Few newspapers offer book reviews anymore, but our daily here in newspaper still thinks books are important enough to review. Here’s the review they published of my latest collection, Watch Us Burn: Poems for a Lost Earth.
From the forest conflagration photo on the front cover and the book’s title, there’s no mistaking Gene Twaronite’s message in this latest collection of his poetry. Turns out, though, it’s not as rough as it might have been, as it also celebrates nature.
Twaronite writes of trees’ means of communicating with each other, and, in a bit of whimsy, questions if they send love notes, or wonder “what it must be like to walk / on feet or touch each other / the way these wise apes do.”
He takes a long view of evolution and cosmic history, claiming kin with ancestral hominin Lucy, and seeing more in common with a gorilla than his blue-eyed forebears who rowed to the New World.
But you can’t miss Twaronite’s point in the title poem. It’s from a section in the book called “Centos,” a form of poetry composed of lines written by other poets. “Watch Us Burn” offers a sharp jolt. Excerpted from it here are lines from Theodore Roethke, Anne Waldman, Margaret Atwood, Alberto Rios and Angelica Freitas:
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see…/ How to fuel the world, then die…./ We smile all the time now, smiles of the lobotomized, and the world fries, no matter how many warnings we have heard … / The facts were told not to speak and were taken away… / Watch us burn: possible epitaph.”
Former high school and college English instructor Christine Wald-Hopkins is an essayist and longtime regional and local book critic.
If you are a Southern Arizona author and would like your book to be considered for this column, send a copy to: Elaine Encinas, P.O. Box 26887, Tucson, AZ, 85726-6887. Give the price and contact name. Books must have been published within a year. Authors may submit no more than one book per calendar year.
Here’s the link in the Daily Star:
https://tucson.com/life-entertainment/local/article_4dd089f2-b08c-40c3-baf2-d473c0c00e84.html