Bruce Beasley

Forbearance

Arts & Literature

“‘To savor the contingency of being’ could be the mission statement of Cameron Brooks’s Forbearance, a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, ‘gaunt silo[s]’ of South Dakota’s High Plains. Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself: ‘the ooze of too-ripe apples / beneath boots,’ ‘the cicada’s tymbal cry.’ In what he calls, with Stevensian grandeur, ‘the verve / of fathomless particularities, / becoming what they only could become,’ Brooks savors, with bemused forbearance and stunned adoration, all the contingent and fleeing moments of ‘the runaway chore of your life.’”

Radiant Obstacles

Arts & Literature

“Our exile into Being and into ‘where Eden once stood, in the ruins,’ becomes for Hankins the source of stunning meditations on metaphysics, faith, and the apparent obstacles to belief that stand as ‘radiant obstacles’ in our path—even the obstacles to the divine leading us into the radiance of hard-won affirmation. The ex of ex nihilo becomes the way out of spiritual nothingness into the ecstatic celebration of the body and the physical world, a nothingness negated through a hard-fought battle. ‘I could not presume to know the Maker’s mind, / but I know something of my own— / I could not bear / to make such magnificent and fleeting things,’ Hankins writes. Yet, in these poems, he has: become, that is, a maker of poems about that fleetingness, poems imbued with a beauty whose radiance dispels the very darkness they illuminate.”