Thursday, July 12, 2007

WWOTB reviewed in Eclectica

From a review of What's Written on the Body by Gilbert Wesley Purdy, in Eclectica magazine.

"There is an attractive poetry in What's Written on the Body. It is a poetry the tropes of which have only been available for the last forty or so years out of all of human existence, at least if one did not possess considerable wealth. It is poetry of affordable health care, electricity, gas, milk, magnolia trees. It is poetry with two weeks available for vacation package tours to Paris, weekends for Sea World, two hours for meditation class, crossword puzzles, anagrams, poems. It is easy to share in the sense of the beauty of our daily lives that Peter Pereira brings to his poems. A mere forty years might suggest that it is an impossibly evanescent poetry if it weren't for our astonishing technological expectations and our ability to service endless amounts of public and private debt."

It's a different kind of review, somewhat experimental, interspersed with quotes from my blog (oh my), things he found on google, and passages from his [the reviewer's] own journal. I think he was a little disappointed with the book, compared to Saying the World, but still found some interesting things to say, and a few poems to praise.

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2 comments:

Radish King said...

Peter, what a lovely and thoughtful review. He read your work thoroughly and (I think) gave an fair account of what he found there. A review that makes the reader want to find out for him or herself. Congrats!

Rob Kistner said...

Interesting… it drew me in.