A Sorting of the Ways

Angebote / Angebote:

Following his break-through first volume of poems, Through the Years (2010), and its successor, Roberta and Other Poems (2011), Ricardo Quinones has upped the ante with a generous selection from those earlier volumes and additions from a ready supply of new poems presented here. A Sorting of the Ways: New and Selected Poems contains such poems as "The Grafting Tree, " a mythical marriage between a giant oak and a chair, "Ten and More, " the record of a ten-year-old's deflating experience of the Korean War after the jubilation of 1945 and the end of WWII, "To Pick a Penny, " another far-reaching poem about the magic qualities of a penny, and "Spoiler Speech, " the fragile hold of civilized consciousness against the uprising of a primitive rage. The volume also announces the demise of the popular "Wallet Poems, " mainly by virtue of their own superabundance and their replacement by a new kind of verse, "Bloc Notes." In the poem "A New Beginning, " Quinones takes the gamble of expressing his own philosophical and moral desideratum as to the nature of art and society, thus enacting his belief that at sometime a writer-poet must come to grips with those things he thinks essential if a society is to be reborn.