I like the humor and matter-of-fact tone of a lot of the sixty-five poems in this book, like the great simile below, which comes from “How we came to live where we live”:<\/p>\n
\nas when you stand before a painting
\nin a museum for as long as you hope
\nsays something good about you, even
\nwhen you’re not sure what that good thing is,
\nthat you’re considerate of red or appreciate
\nthe historical significance of the brocade
\nor know that the woman in the foreground
\nholding the scythe was the painter’s lover\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nMany of these poems are elegies, or include death in various forms, but never in ways that feel heavy-handed, and often in ways that are surprisingly lovely: in “Excerpts from mourning,” the speaker talks about <\/p>\n
Carrying ash of you to the Atlantic
\n(Kittery), bonebits to the Pacific (Point Lobos), giving you
\nto seals and otters and pollution, to waves and forgetting
\nand whales.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nOther highlights for me were Pilgrimage<\/a> (that last stanza especially), Desire<\/a>, and Equine Aubade<\/a>. I was less fond of the poems where sound and rhyme are more prominent, like “Owe is to ode as whatever is to I don’t know,” with rhymes like “I owe the crow, I know” and “When I’m dead, I want my head\/to be ashtray\/in a bus station, tagged\/at will by slugs and mugs,” but when Hicok is writing more prosily, while still playing with poetic form, he’s great, like in this bit from “The days are getting longer”:<\/p>\n
[\u2026] it’s hard
\nto help the dead be dead
\nbefore they are. Mourning<\/p>\ndoves, cardinals, chickadees
\nstrip the cupboard bare
\nin a matter of hours,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I like the humor and matter-of-fact tone of a lot of the sixty-five poems in this book, like the great simile below, which comes from “How we came to live where we live”: as when you stand before a painting in a museum for as long as you hope says something good about you, even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}