Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Acts of Defiance: New and selected poems by Dennis Haskell

by
April 2011, no. 330

Acts of Defiance: New and selected poems by Dennis Haskell

Salt Publishing (Inbooks) $24.95 pb, 142 pp

Acts of Defiance: New and selected poems by Dennis Haskell

by
April 2011, no. 330

First books often suffer most in a Selected Poems as the poet who finally emerges from the possibilities explored in the poems of the first book retrospectively weeds out those poems that are not in what becomes the dominant mode. This certainly happens in the case of Dennis Haskell’s Acts of Defiance, which prunes his first book, Listening at Night (1984), down to a mere seven poems. So Acts of Defiance begins with formal, lengthy, elegiac pieces such as ‘Near Gwabegar’, which focus on an atmosphere of depression – economic and psychological – and long to hear, but fail to hear, the voices of the transcendent. ‘The Call’, in which the poet responds to his young son’s crying out in his sleep, is really, as its title suggests, a little allegory of vocation. Like many of the early poems it puzzles out the metaphysical issues of what ‘God’ is and why he is silent.

Martin Duwell reviews 'Acts of Defiance: New and selected poems' by Dennis Haskell

Acts of Defiance: New and selected poems

by Dennis Haskell

Salt Publishing (Inbooks) $24.95 pb, 142 pp

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.