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We All Reach the Earth by Falling
by Bauke Kamstra 2014 Vine Leaves Vignette Collection Award Semi-Finalist Semi-Finalist of the 2014 Vine Leaves Vignette Collection Award
Publication date: October 6, 2014 Genre: Poetry/General/Canadian Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-0-9925097-5-0 eBook: ISBN-13: 978-0-9925097-6-7 “Much like Guillevic, Kamstra’s micropoetry is aphoristic, typically rejecting metaphors in favour of simple imagery. His poems are like Venn diagrams where two or three ideas are allowed to pool together and poetry forms as they overlap.”
Jim Murdoch, author of This is Not About What You Think |
“In this stunning collection, Bauke Kamstra has scooped out the hollow of nature and returned with the expressions of its soul. Everywhere the poet looks, he sees acutely: a tree ‘has earned/its suffering/and its pieces/falling,’ and of the people who live in its river weathering, Kamstra remembers that ‘my mother's accordion/played so/many hymns/but the ecstasy/was all hers.’
“From the opening poem, in which a woman’s washing reveals her violence, to his lament that he is returning with a war poem but not his leg, ‘because my leg died there,’ Kamstra reveals himself as a deeply gifted poet. Emily Dickinson would have kept this collection nearby.”
Charles Bane, Jr., author of The Chapbook, Love Poems; creator of The Meaning Of Poetry series for the Gutenberg Project, current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida.
“From the opening poem, in which a woman’s washing reveals her violence, to his lament that he is returning with a war poem but not his leg, ‘because my leg died there,’ Kamstra reveals himself as a deeply gifted poet. Emily Dickinson would have kept this collection nearby.”
Charles Bane, Jr., author of The Chapbook, Love Poems; creator of The Meaning Of Poetry series for the Gutenberg Project, current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida.
