A day and a month late, but I'll do two in one day at some point in the month. Yes, that's right, it is (or was) National Poetry Month, and we all know what that means. The Burgeoning Poetry Blogosphere, the Cottage Presbyterian Sentinel, and the Ladies Home Journal all grit their teeth before smiling fixedly and trotting out the Poetry-as-Buckley's-Cough-Syrup routine. Trouble is, usually the hawking of blissful ignorance is much preferred to going along with the undisturbed breath patterns of the smooth set with nothing to say, or the unmodulated noise of interesting story-tellers with a notion of craft as barge or rotting raft.
First up is a gateway book by Stan Ormello. Unfortunately, the gateway here may lean more to freebasing airplane fuel than to Ginsberg or Greville. His Byways And Pixie Dust covers a lot of ground if you equate circling a high school track a hundred times as a fascinating journey. Let's open the pages.
The initial poem is also the title poem, always an indicator that the poet WISHES TO MAKE AN IMMEDIATE AND IMPORTANT STATEMENT. And that statement seems to be: though there be bombs and bad men, sports colour commentators and retro beehive hairdos, there'll always be a song in the heart and a spring in the step of anyone lucky enough to be privy to the glib lozenges of "here the running hare and the placid lake conjoin", which, despite the author's best intention, had me wishing to dive into those still (and deep) waters to rescue that imaginative animule whose brief-hour-and-heard-no-more fate was quite a bit different than that of canny Bugs. Alas, bunny of aborted byways: your past tense foredoomed you. I throw a carrot into your watery cairn and pray that no one takes this review as persiflage.
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