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“You only have to write a poem. It doesn’t have to rhyme. Don’t fret about form. It’ll be good enough. It may be your last or, maybe, the first of many. Who knows?”
The forty-four poems in this collection, All the Purple Iris, are, definitely, autobiographical and a kind of credo. It’s all just I, watching the world, listening to the music it makes, trying to put it into words. It’s an earnest effort to pay attention. A poem can make a long story short and often memorable, like “When you are old and grey and full of sleep…” (W. B. Yeats) or “For this your mother sweated in the cold…” (Edna St. Vincent Millay) or “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” (Robert Frost). Doesn’t it enliven you?
One more thing: Don’t read the whole collection at once. Just one at a time, please, until it feels like a song and it’s you singing. -
This is John’s sixth book, the second book of poems, many written in the past several years. Most of them are about recent events in America or encounters with particularly poetic persons.
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