About the Poetry

The style of the book is its achievement. It plumbs the English stanza. Antecedents for quatrain use go back to the early English ballads, but use of this form in modern times is rare.

That form's use makes rhyme important, and experiments in half-rhyme, where sounds partially rhyme, distinguish the book:

Reputation is the sugar

That precedes the taste

And remains as sweet after intake

And yet will last

The experiential range of these auditory effects in Native Star is new. The English ear has not experienced the range of word-craft in these poems.

Note many influences on the book's language. Sonority, the color of the language, indicates a mentoring by W.B. Yeats. Hugh Kenner wrote a book, The Art of Poetry, and his first chapter studies Yeats' ability to correlate sounds:

Never shall a young man

Thrown into despair

By those great honey colored

Ramparts at your ear,

Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.

Robert Creeley, however, emphasized concision as a virtue, in class at UNM in 1963.

A student approached him once with a question, "To become a writer, what do you need to do?"

"Read and write," he said.

Not only Wallace Stevens, but the Elizabethan bards have influenced this verse. One of the most consonant of English poets is Thomas Campion, and anyone who has studied his work can hear him in the lines:

Time's a designation

No matter where we go.

Days derive from eons

To eons none may know.

"None may know" is pure Campion, vintage 1620.

Overall, the sincerity of statement recalls George Herbert and Wilfred Owen. There seems to be an organic connection between individual poems that, as with these two men in their life-experience, sympathy with their subject prompted. It may have to do with elegiac feeling for our species, and for life in general.

-Stan Renfro