Derik Burleson's brave and terrifying book about genocide in Rwanda broke my heart.As a PCV in the seventies, I knew many of the places he loved, Lake Kivu, Virunga National Park, and the touristy visit to the gorillas who seemed bored with pounding their chests. Burleson's poems remind this reader of the pain of growing to love a country, then seeing its people destroyed in a bloodbath. Worse yet, destroying one another. One tribe played off against another, thanks to the Belgians and their colonial preference for the Tutsis' aquiline features. His use of imagery seems to draw all of nature into the violence,"the pale and carniiverous orchids," the chameleon's tongue "like a bullwhip," "the thin-featured woman/who sold bright fruit door to door,"--now gone. And everywhere men "fingering their machetes" and bloated bodies in the lakes and rivers. Burleson's use of African folktale, as in the woman who can turn herself into a hyena("Nyavirezi"), is charged with premonitions of what is to come. Most powerful of all for this reader were the Remera poems, written from an African point of view, and recounting sorrow after sorrow. Burleson draws on every poem he ever read, and every moment he spent in Africa, and maybe every experience he had as a human being to write this book and help us to understand what happened, and how it happened.

Burleson's poems keep pulling me back with thier elegance, their depth of vision and their travels through human existence. I am thankful that he has the courage to write these poems.

This is a strong book of poems. It is particularly interesting to me as a linguist. Remera's poems echo the origins of language in a fascinating way. Burlesson is on to something fundamentally human with this work. These are images that CNN never brought to us.

I have often read that literature is food for the mind. If that is so then poetry must be food for the soul and this book a feast for the spirit. Where literature deals with ideas, fantasies and the human condition, poetry deals with the emotions, the spirit; the very qualities that raise us above the lower animals (no comments from PETA, Please!). Poetry reaches into each of us and touches that elemental being that many of us deny exists. The Legend of Light by Bob Hicok reaches in and not only touches but pokes, prods and grabs. This, his second book, is the result of winning the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry administered by the University of Wisconsin. His writing style is deceptively simple. He does not try to fry your brain cells with polysyllabic words or convoluted conceptual phrasings or make you tap a rythym. Instead he speaks to you using common vocabulary but painting such vivid imagery that your hackles rise and you shake to settle your fur. Much of his work has a dark side or, rather, addresses the dark side we would rather ignore. Some poems are equipped with claws that dig into your heart and squeeze till tears come, tears not of pain but of empathy, of compassion. I could not finish his poem Visiting the Wall until the third attempt, his descriptive phrasing affecting me the same as if I had been there. I don't think Mr. Hicok was old enough to be a brother of mine from the 'Nam but he let me once again cry. Another favorite of mine (actually, all but about two are favorites) is Surgery. If memory serves, this was written after his own surgery. If you have ever been undrer hte knife, you can feel as he speaks. "Masked, they cut you, peel back your skin for the legend of light to enter your body. In this moment they love you......." In AIDS, Mr. Hicok manages to convey nothing of being a homosexual, a drug addict or a maligned lover; He does not rail at the injustice of it all. What he does very well is impart the feeling of loss, the joy of love, of needing and being needed. His poetry deals with the frustration of not being able to communicate these things, of being blocked out and locked in. In the end, as the narrator leaves home, his last thought was But all I can think of is that you love as you have to and die the best you can. In the end, that's all that any of us can hope for. This slim volume (79 pages) has affected me more than most books I've read in the past year. Much of the work, as I said earlier, deals with the dark. The dark in us, the dark around us. From Neighbor, about a man living under the bridge to Dogfish Mother all are guaranteed to open the your spirit-eyes and make you feel again. It has taken me most of a year to read, re-read digest and accept what he was trying to tell me. I understood and felt everything but I also had to accept it. I have at last and encourage all of you to do the same. Thank you for joining me. Joe Zucatti

Charles Webb is a poet of surprising versatility who has the sense and timing of the comedy stand-up performer but, just when one accepts his comedic self, touches one's heart with his thoughtful,"Inheritance" and "Chapel in the Pines" and "Floating Loin," as well as the title poem "Liver."

This volume marks Clewell's arrival in the realm of poetry that contributes something substantial to literature. It's not as inspired on the whole as _The Conspiracy Quartet_, which is his best book to date, but it contains some of his best individual poems.

I wish you would buy this book. You need this book. Everyone you know needs a copy of this book. The holidays are coming up. Birthdays, Anniversaries, Mondays. All good reasons to get this book and give it to someone you care about. Your life will be better for it--his or her life will be better for it--I promise. It's all about seeing the world clearly and loving it anyway, or rather, because.

Intellect, lyricism, deft language, personality, topics of the heart, the landscape and everything in between ... This is the real stuff, a voice that has earned its clarity, honed a point of view, and insists on humor and good spirirts. Had enough of Jorie Graham? Try Clewell.