Martin Woodside

The speaker of these poems is caught up in the city of Bucharest, enamored and amused by its moods and its people. Some of the images here capture and communicate the odd specifics of a city very well, such as an old man "caressing the sky with his fist" or "the spent trees outside our barred windows / the way nights here loosen and stray / our bodies tangled a catalog / of wounded nerves," or a man letting the trimmings of his mustache fall into an empty pint glass. Sadly though, it feels like for every good line there is another that captures little, that holds too much of what has been said before. If not a familiar phrase, a forced bit of sound pushed through a vague word better left unsaid. A number of these poems are polished and evocative, but for every one of those such pieces, there is another that feels like an embryonic thought straining against a spanning subject, a poem that fumbles its way towards meaning and falls into a puddle of familiarity that gives us no real reflection. There is a great potential in many of these poems that feels staggeringly unrealized, lines that were untested and undisturbed by doubt once they were crafted.… (altro)