The scents that permeate the poems of AROMATICS include bittersweet
ones of memory, acrid ones of danger, and many others equally
enticing or alarming. Candles-in this enlightened age, who needs
them? Everyone and his mother, it appears. And what they're after
more than anything is opportunity to choose aromas. As in Robert B.
Shaw's previous work, his questing scrutiny of the world's inner
mysteries is revealed in daily concerns and the self-reflection and
hope that accompanies it. Looking through the skylight a moment
after midnight, I found my gaze returned. The seven bright eyes
burned with neither love nor hate. Robert Frost once offered this
definition of a successful poem: "Read it a hundred times: it will
forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance." The
poems in this book aspire to that high standard. "Robert Shaw can
do almost anything in verse, and do it well. His structural
patterns vary; the range of his subjects is wide, but his New
England sensibility is bedrock; unexpected shifts and turns mark
many poems. His voice is conversational yet quietly formal, amiably
inviting to his reader. Everything, no matter how randomly it may
seem to occur, is aimed. His rare and subtle ways of observing the
things of this world are also affectionate and welcoming.
Aromatics, Shaw's sixth book of poetry, caps 30 years of work, of
saying what he has 'lived to say.' It's a gem."-Dabney Stuart,
Author of "Tables" "Undaunted by 'the heatless fire of time' (not
heartless-heatless), unafraid of the monsters of myth (check the
poem about Perseus), and wonderfully allusive, whether comic (how
did Rilke get into that gym? see the end of 'Working Out') or
tragicomic (see the villanelle 'Single File, ' with its joke
against Frost's 'Design'), Shaw demonstrates once again his care
and craft, his mix of transatlantic, or traditional, elegance and
New England honesty, of fluent blank verse and rhyme, attentive
to-rather than bound by-the examples of Frost, Auden, Merrill. Here
is an unshowy, confident, and often masterful collection: read it
and hear it, and you might just find yourself saying, some times,
'What a neat effect ' and at others, simply, 'Life is like
that.-Stephen Burt, professor of English at Harvard, Author of
"Close Calls with Nonsense"
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