In Praise of Falling (Pitt Poetry Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)I was repeatedly surprised and delighted with this remarkable book of poetry. Cheryl Dumesnil has an incredible sense of balance. Her poetry is full of heart, but never mawkish. She is witty, but she never lets cleverness eclipse feeling; she surprises and startles us, but there is no deliberate shock value in her choices of word or image. You never feel manipulated. She writes of a soldier, posing for a snapshot as he leaves his ramshackle family home to fight a hopeless war in a far away country, and while the reader is always conscious that he is facing death or worse, she gives you another perspective:
the soldier's creased shoulders
wait to grow chevrons: inverted Vs
flying upward; out of this place
This revealing step in an unexpected direction happens in several of her poems--a young woman's tryst with a boyfriend is not the tribute to the sweetness of newly-discovered sexuality or lament for lost innocence we anticipate; it is instead a portrait of desperate flight--or perhaps a taste of the ecstasy of escape?
Dumesnil never becomes formulaic as she expresses her unique vision of the world. She's just-- different. So she sees differently. And--lucky us--she shares her perspective with feeling and with skill and wakes us up to this fine and perplexing world in a way that's all her own.

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The poems in this collection are the proverbial spring bulbs abandoned in the basement, growing toward a slim crack of sunlight. They are both aware of the limitations of social structures and forcefully committed to breaking out of those traps, urging toward a better way of living. The characters in these poems resist the twenty-first century's prescription for a life of emotional-spiritual bankruptcy, reaching toward an ever-elusive glimmer on the horizon.

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