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"The poems in this fine collection sing of soldiers who return from
the wars, stricken revenants from Grant to the poet's father. Bruce
Guernsey has given us an Odyssey in small, lyric and elegiac,
a lonely, haunted and haunting, moving book forever homeward bound."
order
from Water Press & Media |
New England Primer "New England Primer is the best damn book of poetry I've read
in a good long while. "Ice Fishing," "The Owl," "Long Distance," "The
Compass"—these are poems like nobody else's."
"Bruce Guernsey's truths are important. His very human poems--so often
about innocent things like fishing, splitting wood, or simply walking--reveal
another world where an owl's eyes become a hangman's, or God, a swaddled,
illegitimate child. These discoveries are even more disturbing because
they come from words so clean and direct." order
from Amazon.Com |
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Copyright © 2010 Bruce Guernsey. All rights reserved. 
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January Thaw "Bruce Guernsey knows the rhythms we move to when we're alone, and he lays them down
around us in his lines. He's a sharp-eared craftsman, with a feel for
such elements of poetry as line-breaks and resolution and the five-stress
beat that comes through the skillfully casual diction as a continual
and good surprise. Here is a poet." "These poems are minimal to the eye only. Guernsey's method is to focus
on the character of an elemental object until he invests it with associations
that enlarge it, you might say historicize it: a chopping block...becomes
the pillow for a beheaded emperor, a shelf of thumbs from centuries
of thieves, a setting for the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham—and these
in a few terse lines.... Guernsey is a spook, warming his hands over
a spit-stove." |
