Eliza Blue

Forbearance

Arts & Literature

“Cameron Brooks’s debut book is about forbearance but capably avoids falling into sepia-toned stoicism. Instead, Brooks’s collection offers a delicate, keening sense of all that is beautiful, fleeting, as well as what endures without ever becoming maudlin. The sense that time is moving as swiftly as wind through tall grass imbues these poems as in ‘McKennan’s Golden Hour’ when the narrator recounts, ‘Fretting about the coming weeks / which are by now many weeks gone by . . . ’ Brooks is also a musician, and it shows. Even the titles of the poems sound like lyrics to a song, such as ‘The Cottonwoods Were Sowing Starry Seeds,’ and they are just as pleasurable to read.”