David Ferry

Painstaker

Arts & Literature

“There is continuous great authority in the writing of this book, evidenced throughout in the skill of the free verse, so variously expressive and so true to the experiences described. The latter half of the book is a series of poems about the death by calamitous sickness of a friend, who, from childhood like a brother, was a fellow teacher, fellow poet, and side-by-side fellow human being. It is one of the most extraordinary such kinship sequences ever written; its intensity of compassion and pain comes not from mere store-bought declaration, but from the painstaking continuous skill in the truth-telling of the lines.”