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Overview
These are dramatic monologues rooted in New England, but ranging widely over a spectrum of emotions and narrative styles. They speak in the voices of fathers to daughters, sons to mothers, sisters to brothers, and wives to husbands. They are intimate, reflective, and coloquial. In the tradition of Frost and Robinson, they tell stories about how we deal with pain and endure with those we love the most."Faces in a Single Tree has a reach and an amplitude of telling that only a mature poet could embrace. Reading the poems in order is like putting together a whole nexus of human lives, the human family: lost brothers, wood-splitting fathers, haunted and haunting mothers, wives who live in purple or red; they are all related. The lines they speak come right out of daily talk, yet remain in the rhythm of poetry, and the images from poem to poem rebound off one another. What a human, what a brave testament they are, and how cunningly put."—Gail Goodwin
"With this new book of monologues Robert Pack becomes the true heir of his fellow New Englander, Robert Frost. It is a great rarity at any time but I think especially now to find voices so believable and verse so good."- Donald Justice
"These dramatic monologues are not just poetry; they are our own voices- if we dared uttered these thoughts and feeling. The subjects of these poems are the things we imagine saying to our loved ones, or our most intimate friends, but we can never quite find the right moment; they remain unsaid. Not in this book. These monologues express such intimacy; they say the unspeakable."—John Iving
Synopsis
These are dramatic monologues rooted in New England, but ranging widely over a spectrum of emotions and narrative styles. They speak in the voices of fathers to daughters, sons to mothers, sisters to brothers, and wives to husbands. They are intimate, reflective, and coloquial. In the tradition of Frost and Robinson, they tell stories about how we deal with pain and endure with those we love the most.
"Faces in a Single Tree has a reach and an amplitude of telling that only a mature poet could embrace. Reading the poems in order is like putting together a whole nexus of human lives, the human family: lost brothers, wood-splitting fathers, haunted and haunting mothers, wives who live in purple or red; they are all related. The lines they speak come right out of daily talk, yet remain in the rhythm of poetry, and the images from poem to poem rebound off one another. What a human, what a brave testament they are, and how cunningly put."—Gail Goodwin
"With this new book of monologues Robert Pack becomes the true heir of his fellow New Englander, Robert Frost. It is a great rarity at any time but I think especially now to find voices so believable and verse so good."- Donald Justice
"These dramatic monologues are not just poetry; they are our own voices- if we dared uttered these thoughts and feeling. The subjects of these poems are the things we imagine saying to our loved ones, or our most intimate friends, but we can never quite find the right moment; they remain unsaid. Not in this book. These monologues express such intimacy; they say the unspeakable."—John Iving