Thursday, November 5, 2009

Joel Brouwer on Daniel Simko's "The Arrival"

"Tonally and formally, the poems are clear kin to the Soviet Mitteleuropa house style of Popa, Sorescu, and Holub: simple sentences, stark and dramatic imagery, wry fatalism, winks of humor. In terms of content, of particular note is the poet’s (wholly understandable) obsession with deracinations both geographical and lingual. The poems of displacement — from the homeland and from the mother tongue — are . . . well, stunning. They leave me speechless. They sound like poems trying to carve themselves into my head." Clink on the link for the rest of this review.

-September 23, 2009, from Harriet, a blog from the Poetry Foundation