Thirteeners

Ray Greenblatt's latest collection, Thirteeners, is inspired by Ken Stone's now-gone Thirteen Magazine, whose one requirement of its contributors was that every poem had to be thirteen lines. Mr. Greenblatt takes that conceit and structures the twelve sections of Thirteeners' poems, each precisely thirteen lines in length, around the twelve months of the year. As any writer or reader of poetry can attest, brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can be the bane of the poet in hands...
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Ray Greenblatt's latest collection, Thirteeners, is inspired by Ken Stone's now-gone Thirteen Magazine, whose one requirement of its contributors was that every poem had to be thirteen lines. Mr. Greenblatt takes that conceit and structures the twelve sections of Thirteeners' poems, each precisely thirteen lines in length, around the twelve months of the year. As any writer or reader of poetry can attest, brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can be the bane of the poet in hands less-skilled than Mr. Greenblatt's. In this collection of tight, precise verse, no word is wasted, and Mr. Greenblatt presents the reader with poems of daily life and experience that are deeply humanistic, connecting the narrator of each poem with universal experience. There are startling images throughout, as in "Diminishing Myths" ("?the poor possum/a broken man resorting/to playing dead?the death/of a fox on the road ? the myth of its wildness/slowly diminishing.") or "Two Sides of a Cemetery" ("But at night it comes/alive, reading its own/epitaphs by an ancient/torch of moonlight, counting/time?"). There also is startling poignancy, as a poem ("Woman Among The Trees") whose first stanza is about a tree "so eaten away inside ? when that tree does die we will barely know and/simply call it grace" reveals itself in the next stanza to be about coming to grips with the death of a loved one "killed by a small growth in her chest." Mr. Greenblatt transforms the ordinary experiences of simply being alive into deeper truths. In the collection's final poem the reader is cautioned, "Remember, if you/discover an evil poem/and can do nothing with it,/hurry to the woods/and bury it hoping/at least a fern will grow." In Thirteeners, Mr. Greenblatt has given us a forest of verse to exult in.Joseph Cilluffo, author of ALWAYS IN THE WRONG SEASON