Reviewed by Steven Croft As Gordon Johnston’s fellow Georgia writer Tony Grooms has said, “Writers are, by occupation, collectors—not just of books—but observations and experiences.” Scaring the Bears: Poems (Mercer University Press, 2021) is a “middle-of-the-journey” consideration by a fifty-something speaker of an entire life: where he has been and where he believes he is going. The […]
“The Murderous Sky: Poems of Madness and Mercy” by Rosemary Daniell
September 19, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Steven Croft Its possibilities for expression limitless, poetry can evoke many things, but as an art form it reverberates especially affectively within crisis: take for example the poetries of Homer or Sylvia Plath. Rosemary Daniell, who identifies as a Southerner, has been one of the South’s bravest poets and nonfiction writers for decades. […]
David Bottoms’s “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump”: Forty Years Later
February 10, 2022 by 1 Comment
Essay by Steven Croft After forty years, David Bottoms remains a poet of Georgia who, like other great Southern writers of place, e.g., Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers, is able to make the markedly regional universal. Author of nine full-length books of poetry, Bottoms increasingly asks through the arc of these books, to quote Wallace Stevens in […]