Green Hill

Bouts of lyric clarity and sudden plunges through cogitating thickets

If you feel you’ve been hiding too much in the open, it’s time to look into a new book of poems by an old friend, Mebane Robertson, Signal from Draco. I know, “this is a friend of his, so of course...” OK, but tell me if you find another book like this, the first volume in Black Widow’s ‘New Poets’ series (www.blackwidowpress.com). It is an uncommon collection, at once generous and unsparing. The book can be compared to a broad canvas, or perhaps a sequence of five canvases to correspond to the book's sections; mingling there are elements of imbedded information, a personal geography, and a psychic itinerary. Though tightly woven and economical, the poems are never reductive in tracing thought and emotion through the entire bric-a-brac of experience. The book’s layered soliloquies are as exacting as life: they refuse to broker an expedient deal with daily living and the nightcrawl to come up with something reassuringly tidy but untrue. As I read, I thought if Berryman were here, and he could mosh, he might say these lines.

I hope to post some of Mebane's work here soon.