Tom Rabbitt's poems seem straightforward. At first you might not even notice the careful form and particular syntax because the lifetime that he has spent honing his art is invisible. Or transparent, like a window. His language is plain, and he relies on his humor and honesty to draw the reader into his take on the world. It is almost as if he is telling you a story over beer, or a few beers, because the stories he tells you are more tragic and funny and bluntly honest than you'd hear from most folks. These stories could be about the Pope, or Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or a blind lightbulb telemarketer, the death of Robert Lowell, the explosion of a fireworks factory, or the swarms of late summer bugs in the South and how he grew tired of teaching. They're odd stories, but not really so odd. They stick with you and help you to see the oddness of life around you. That's Rabbitt's wisdom, which, to return to my earlier analogy, is the glare on the glass that makes the window -- his art -- visible at last.

This ninth and latest collection of poems by Tom Rabbitt is uncompromising--stretching the possibilities of language and image in every line, never yielding to cliche or cheap sentiment or predictable rhythms. Ostensibly about a life-shift from the deep South to New England and finally to the west coast of Ireland, the poems are fierce meditations on the ironies of middle age and the inevitability of change. Rabbitt's insights--often searing in their honesty--are disciplined by a respect for form and a subtlety of craft lacking in so much of contemporary poetry. I highly recommend the book.

This is a collection of some of the most self-satisfied, crypto-hateful poems I've ever read. I would recommend this book to insomniacs, if it weren't for the fact that it would probably induce terminal narcolepsy. This writer should be abandoned immediately.

Only a handful of poets today have the technical control and precision of language which Thomas Rabbitt regularly reveals in his poetry, and even fewer have the gumption to challenge our preconceptions by wrestling with difficult emotions without trivializing them. Rabbitt is not a poet for MTV poet-wannabes; to appreciate his oeuvre requires sensitivity to language and the human condition and at least some familarity with the canon of English-language poetry.