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Rooms the Wind Makes
Guernica Editions, Spring 2012
125 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550713633
ISBN10: 1550713639
English
$5.95 Canada, $5.95 US
Read more from the Essential Poets Series
The publication of Rooms The Wind Makes completes a cycle of four poetry collections, the preceding volumes being No Cold Ash, Even This Land Was Born Of Light, and When Rivers Speak. James Deahl has been called "one of the ten or twenty finest poets writing in the English language." His poetry has been described as "precise articulations of landscape ..." producing "a highly charged evocation of place ... that it is as if the reader were the first person to stand there." This collection continues Deahl's exploration of the natural world around him in language that is precise and startling, tinged with nostalgia but bravely facing the realities, and always with an eye on the larger picture.
A well-known poet whose work I feel especially close to is Denise Levertov. In much of her poetry she celebrates the grace, beauty, and goodness of creation while expressing sorrow at the blindness and violence of fallen mankind. The second piece in Rooms The Wind Makes is my letter in poetry, sparked by the glowing beauty of Lisboa, Portugal, to Ms. Levertov. Many of the poems in my book deal with her two major concerns as well as the brevity of life and the universal fact of suffering and death.
James Deahl
“My Father Sits In A Wheelchair In A Nursing Home Where Whorehouses Once Overlooked The Youghiogheny River” is a poem, for its baroque title alone, to make Charles Bukowski get up jealously from his grave and claim as his own … “Driving Through Maine With Robert Johnson On The Box” is an excellent blues poem … which makes the reader feel that they are right there in that car with the narrator. James Deahl is capable of writing very good poems; there’s ample evidence of that here.
Kevin Higgins in Vallum
Books by James Deahl
