Amazon's editorial review says this is her 2nd collection of poems, but it's her 3rd, the first 2 in order being Blackbird Bye-Bye & Psalms. April Bernard's language in this collection is ambitious & saturated with the modern world in melancholy, poetic experiments, & themes. April Bernard is a fantastic poet, very knowledgeable. Since you've gotten to the point of reading this review, you should just buy the book already.

I have been lucky enough to take classes with April Bernard (she teaches at my college--Bennington) and her passion for language is as evident in the classroom as it is in her writings. This is a must read for anyone who loves language and/or for anyone who wants to be a writer.

Overall, an excellent novel. I've read many of Sharpe's adventures, and have enjoyed them all. This particular story deals with the siege of Badajoz. It has everything we've come to expect from a Richard Sharpe novel: action, mind-boggling battle scenes, and the occasional romance. My only complaint sounds kinda dumb, even to myself-- the villian, Obadiah Hakeswill. Every so often an author comes up with a villian that he can't bring himself to kill. Even, as in this case, when it goes against all common sense. The character, Sharpe, simply would not allow an enemy to escape as many times as Hakeswill does. I know this is nit-picking, but having some experience in the military, I can safely say that an infantryman does NOT leave an enemy behind him. Not alive, anyway. Okay, enough whining from me. Again, this is an excellent read. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in historical fiction, action, or military history.

What are some of the reasons why you read books?

* Do you like adventure? * Do you like romance? * Do you like action? * Do you like history?

If you answered yes to the above then you will enjoy Sharpe's Company. I started reading these books and I find myself having a hard time putting them down.

Sharpe's Company by Bernard Cornwell is an exciting rip-roaring adventure addition to the Sharpe series. You can see Bernard Cornwell's extensive research come to life page after page. The setting is 1812 and the British forces are re-grouping in Spain to repulse the dreaded French juggernaut led by Napoleon. Sharpe's challenge is to defeat the French forces at Badajoz, retain his rank and marry the girl of his desires. All of Sharpe's soldiers are in attendance and ready for battle.

Sharpe lost his rank due to a clerical error in England and is now a mere lieutenant. He answers to a commanding officer that has never led a battle command. The captain who replaced him is a well meaning light-weight who lets his sergeant give the orders.

Additionally, the evil Sergeant Hakeswell is back in Sharpe's life again and up to his old tricks. I don't think I can imagine of a better villain than Hakeswell. He is ugly, twisted and thoroughly evil. There are no redeeming values to his character. He wants to kill Sharpe and ruin his career. Even Sharpe's friends are in danger from this psychopath.

Where Cornwell shines is the description of the battle. He paints a picture of the siege at Badajoz so realistic that you visualize the battle and all of its horrors. His details are fascinating. For example, the advantages and disadvantages of a rifle and a musket, the uses of cannon to reduce castle walls to rubble and the siege warfare techniques of 1800s.

I wholeheartedly endorse this book.

I'm a little more than halfway through Bernard Cornwell's 'Sharpe' series and so far 'Sharpe's Company' is my favorite. This novel has Richard Sharpe fighting for his command and his family while waging war against the French held fortress of Badajoz. And as though this task wasn't daunting enough, Sharpe's nemisis Obidiah Hakeswill returns to settle an old score. Consistently entertaining, Cornwall's attention to detail is nothing less than awe-inspiring. I would highly recommend 'Sharpe's Comapany' to anyone interested in military fiction or to lovers of great action and suspence novels.

"Psalms," the second collection of poetry by New York poet April Bernard, just doesn't sing the way many literary critics and poets seem to think a contemporary American poem should sing. Ever since the namby-pamby "conversational" movement hit the scene in the early 1980s, poets and critics alike generally have spurned experimentation--mainly in reaction to the hopelessly arcane and often occult ramblings and ruminations that made the late 1960s and early 1970s such a weird period, as dominated by dozens and dozens of Robert Lowell wannabes and John Ashberry clones. Ostensibly, the whole idea behind making poems that reflect the "conversational" style of American speech and discourse was to bring poetry down to where the proverbial goats can get it: close to the ground, not up in the trees. Hopefully--especially according to the practitioners who found they had less trouble than others slipping into the new ethic--the tactic of making poetry more accessible to a general readership would attract an actual audience to a flagging artform.

Of course, that tactic, successful to a vast degree, had its down side: Although audiences for poetry were indeed growing, more and more poems were beginning to sound like Dear Abby advice columns that had been reassembled to look like poetry. Although the meaning of most poems had been rendered more transparent by turning a poem into a rarefied form of newspaper punditry, the capacity for a poem to convey meaning outside the paradigm of an assembly of words and prefabricated metaphorical opportunities had been either reduced or made even more difficult for those of us who do the actual assembly.

With her first major collection, 1988's "Blackbird Bye Bye" April Bernard not only anticipated the backlash to "conversational" poetry that is currently gaining steam in America's literary underground, she transcended that backlash. Not content to rely on the epigramatic and the traditional form--as do many so-called "formalist" thinkers such as Dana Giola and Frederick Turner--Bernard parodied traditional forms, combining symbolist techniques with beat techniques, early free verse stylistics with blends of classical and postmodern, and even throwing in a bit of abstract expressionism-borne tactics such as combinations of disjunct and disconnected images into a whole that, if not greater than the sum of its parts, was at least qualitatively different than that sum.

"Psalms" is an extension of Bernard's experimentation. Taking on only the barest semblence of the ancient psalmist forms of prayer and song, Bernard explores a variety of sensations and mental states often discarded by contemporaries who are stiving for what poet Robert Bly calls "heat"--that one kernel of meaning at the end of a poem that snaps all the pieces together in a sort of "aha!" In other words, Bernard's poems are not meant to connect in the same way. Bernard, rather, is concerned with connecting her readers with experience that can't be rationally grasped.

In "Psalms", the colorations are indeed grim: Early in the first cycle of psalms, Bernard comments on the odd new tints emanating from nearby streetlights. Inside the glass bulbs (read: poetic forms), new and oddly unsettling gasses are being illuminated by power that has been generated far beyond the horizon. In her typically sardonic way, then, Bernard seeks to encapsulate the drift of American poetry by dismissing all of it as hot gas captured in, well, glass. But that's how she feels about it. Comparisons to Plath's "The Bell Jar" notwithstanding.

The sum total of "Psalms" is akin to Wallace Steven's "Sea Surface Full of Clouds"--the classic poetic cycle that repaints the same scene from the deck of a cruise ship in a variety of differing colors. Repeating a variety of lietmotifs, Bernard connects her psalms into a complex emotional statement of both grief and terror. Together, the poems seem to hold both prayer and the sacred in the contempory urban vein as essays in futility.... Had Bernard opted to leaven her psalms with a little joy and happiness here and there, this book would have seemed far less tedious than it does--regardless of some of the finest technique displayed by any young poet in America.

I find this poetry fascinating. The form of the poetry evokes (and occasionally uses) the forms of the Biblical Psalms. The subject matter sometimes corresponds to the Biblical expectations as well. But within this framework, the poetry is firmly committed to a very urban, hard and somewhat dark view of contemporary life. The poet is very skilled - the craftsmanship is there but invisible - i.e. the content rather than craft comes through in reading these poems. This book is well worth reading - even if you find you don't like the poems, your appreciation for poetry should be expanded by seeing what April Bernard has achieved

April Bernard's language is always new, & in this book especially it feels very crisp.