The Sweeping Plain
Five Island Press, $21.95 pb, 84 pp
Andrew Burns reviews "The Sweeping Plain" by Michael Sharkey
The title poem of Michael Sharkey’s The Sweeping Plain – his first book of poetry since the retrospective History: Selected Poems 1978–2000 (2002) – is a polemic against politically conservative suburbia. The poem portrays a desert-like ‘sweeping plain’ of insularity, never-ending and utterly homogenous: ‘They look at others like themselves / in their home entertainment centres, / knowing answers to such questions as the names / of others living in that world.’ It is a pacey and rhythmic poem, with some surprising turns of imagery. The tone is measured rather than overly rhetorical, but it’s certainly not a new idea.
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