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Open Books: Events
September 12, 2008 07:30 PM
JOHN WITTE
Second Nature ($19.95 University of Washington), John Witte's third
collection, is the latest volume in the U.W. Press's Pacific Northwest
Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds. Mr. Witte writes sure handed and
compassionate poetry. He rarely uses punctuation, and his line breaks are
marvelously unexpected and propulsive, techniques that give his work a
dreamy intensity. His poems, most one page long, are fugue-like, weaving
images and experiences without extraneous threads. And Mr. Witte employs
metaphor masterfully, as when, in the poem "Captivity," his apparently
adolescent daughter refuses to tend their goats, put off by the stink and
physicality of it all. The poem ends, "once she / found a rat fallen into /
the plastic grain bin frantically digging in the foot // of food trapped /
in its heaven she heard it / squeal scuttling up the sheer walls and falling
back." He has edited Northwest Review for several years; his long
association with the art and craft of poetry results in his own solidly
self-assured, formally interesting, and humane work.
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