Customer Reviews

Lost Horse Press New Poets Series: New Poets, Short Books, Volume V: 5 (Lost Horse Press New Poets: New Poets - Short Books)

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Robert Peake is a first-rate poet whose collection, Human Shade, is a cycle of very tender and very finely crafted poems taken up with a father's difficult and dignified work mourning the loss of his infant son. "Dear imagination of a boy, my round idea," the poet writes in Father-Son Conversation, "you will not know the calluses on my hand./ I will not teach you to wave hello."

The poet's lyricism rises and falls along the tide of personal devastation as it seeks peace and wisdom, passage beyond a torrent of grief. In Jonah, Peake writes, "Although we never met, your/ story is all too understandable,/ since all of us are stowaways, deep/ in the hold, tossed on a storm." This same movement is so beautifully captured in Road Sign On Interstate 5, in which the central image portrays the silhouettes of father, mother, and daughter in flight. Set to warn drivers of immigrants passing into America, it is at first useful to condemn a larger native hypocrisy and xenophobia, for "It is the same type of sign that might contain/ the antlered shape of a generic black buck,/ or tell drivers that the road could be slippery when wet." But soon after, the poet turns inward, "I have never wanted anything this much for myself,/ let alone to pull those closest to me in flight" and finally focuses on the fate of the nuclear family, "The man is pulling the woman is pulling the child,/ who rises as though winged in a blaze of light."

Human strength and human fragility are central to Peake's writing even in a short poem like Radish, which opens with the disarmingly funny lines, "She has let herself go:/ the stringy gray-green mop...soil stains on a faded red leotard/ bulging with crisp, white flesh." before transforming the image two lines later from dumpy comfy homebody into an evocative symbol of what human beings are perhaps fated to drag around in their bruised and aging chests, for "Plucked into air, now/ she trembles in hand,/ a scalded heart/ still pulsing."

Or perhaps not, as we are reminded in Acheron, "Who knew the river of death would be beautiful?" And later in Meteorology, "And then, it is over--/ a break in the clouds,/ which were never evil,/ and the sun, which is not good,/ streams into the wet yard,/ glistening, not as a symbol,/ but the simple refraction/ of light."

Human Shade is a wonderful first book. I look forward to more of Peake's poems.