Sound / Hammer by Dennis Barone

(Quale Press 2015)

Sound / Hammer by Dennis Barone maps the way forgetting interacts with remembering. His poems are precise and witty, the words starkly present, the reference blurry. He uncovers political and empty gibberish, exposing even the contemporary eco-friendly “we” with our chainsaws heading toward “The tall green trees.” No matter how hard we try, we never get it right. Koan-like these poems refract from particularity to particularity, and intermittently, Barone-like, they lean into the future, the past “a gate as it flares/into this wondrous span of light, life.”