The Guardian's Poem of the Week, from Imagined Sons, with a splendid review

I'm delighted that one of my birthmother's catechisms is The Guardian's "Poem of the Week," selected by Carol Rumens, yet perhaps more moved by Rumens' overall account of the book, wonderfully appreciative and astute. Describing the Imagined Sons prose poems, she writes, "Funny at times, fast-moving and psychologically astute, these tiny monologues are held together by a narrative voice as seemingly self-possessed as it is candid." Of the catechisms, she says, "Etter reinterprets the form as both a psychological and a melodic device. The intense, same-question repetition pushes the speaker into a corner, where poetic self-defence may be disarmed, the creative play of the prose poems distilled to a barer essence." Concluding with her analysis of the catechism that asks, "Who do you think you are?," Rumens comments on the last line, "It's a cadence of renunciation, singular and resonant, in a text otherwise charged with restless energy and novelistic powers of invention."
  
Heartening and gratifying....

 

"Three Statues" is Poem of the Week at The Poetry Library

An old poem of mine (written in 1997), "Three Statues," is currently Poem of the Week on The Poetry Library's magazine site. It was originally published in Tenth Muse 13 (2004).