let's review!

yeah, i confess it.  when shit goes south i read poems.  perhaps that is not quite the full truth because i read poems all the time.  but my reading is contingent on the things going on in my life, & in the life of our civilization.  yes, that is a big claim.  but it is to absolute music i aspire.  & i know that there are a great many poets of the recent past who have gone thru so much more than i have.

at any rate, i also love reading reviews.  blogs, once upon a time, were a great source of reviewing books & poems.  sometimes they still are.  so tonight, after a long day at the office, when my mind is still shocked by the turn of events yesterday, i looked up a poet that i've read off & on for a couple of years now, doug anderson.

doug anderson started writing poetry rather later in life.  he served in vietnam as a marine corspsman & seen some serious shit.  much of his writing is about his experience in war.  but surprisingly most of his poems, that i've read, remain buoyant.  even if their subjects are very dark  anderson is the kind of poet that writes of horror & despair but his style 'sings of hope.'

so then but, i read this review, https://www.valpo.edu/valparaiso-poetry-review/2023/05/19/doug-anderson-review-by-rob-greene/, written by fellow poet rob greene tonight & am utterly charmed by it.  greene is a new poet to me as well.  i looked him up & found a few of his poems online that have a grit & honesty to them that makes the reader keeping going in their horrors & adventures.  as an aside, because my own name is common as clay, there are a few other writers named robert greene, one a contemporary novelist, i think, the other is an elizabethan dramatist who was apparently a rapscallion criminal bohemian [my kind of writer!].

what charmed me in greene's review is the rather simplicity of style.  no post-graduate show-off writing.  no critical theory vernacular.  & this moment of honesty & tenderness when describing the hallucinations of a speaker in an anderson poem greene says

On the trip “Driving Down Route 9 Last Night” we motor on by the Veterans’ hospital, where some of us hallucinate in the radical dark either by way of the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Schizophrenia. I am not positing the speaker has either of these conditions though I, as the reviewer, have both these illnesses so I can easily see the hallucinatory images Anderson conjures up from his memories of the Vietnam war, and yes, these are valid and yes, they are believable.

you got me rob greene!  your humility & bravery in your honesty about your illness is just, i don't know why, it just is, the balm i needed after the harrowing we have all gone thru these past 24 plus hours.  greene's forthrightness underscores, to me, his vitality while having a mental illness.  which is, again, a balm for me in my own sufferings of mental illness.  for mental illness is not, should not, be a taboo.  mental illness is a fact of life for some of us.  to which we do, because we got no choice, in keeping on keeping on.