Candy Necklace (Wesleyan Poetry (Paper))

Rating:
Summary: Dazzling and musical, this book feeds your mind and ear.
Review: Like Robert Browning in "Porphyria's Lover," Cal Bedient gets inside the heads of the ill and insane. His poems "Very Oyster, Very Few," "Grief," "Any Son of a Bitch," "The Child is the Keeper of the Garden" are especially like Browning's in their ability to evoke a startled and often deeply emotional response from the reader. The poet's facility with language is astounding: fresh, demanding, luscious, and free as in these lines from "Back a Van Gogh Yellow": "Life, you say, is the greatest / nothing, exactly imagined-- / red-gold on the wall / the ellipsoid / smear of the sun."