Asphodel

Rating:
Summary: Canadian Redhill's work is subtle and mysterious
Review: I wasn't as pleased with this book as I was with the brilliant LAKE NORA ARMS, which is plaintive and charming and subtle and quirky and bittersweet, the whispering of a Luna Moth . . . But Asphodel is a very strong book. Unfortunately, Asphodel's first section, a sequence about alzheimer's, although moving, never really takes off. There's no room for emotional upheavel, catharsis. But his poems in the middle section are why one comes to Redhill. The poems are slight, the language spare, and they echo back cloud-shadows of deeply realized--one wants to say spiritual--and soulful still lifes, landscapes about the love of Place, of Home. Many of them are truly haunted (read "Viewing Detroit"). The third section, which purports to use The Aeneid as its model, begins: "At first the thick night-black/ cauls the eye. I push through/ past the wintering space,/ the body's sleep, up/ and into waking. Straightening/ in bed, a fire blinking on, sleep's/ a leaf of death." I don't need to add anything after that.