Flying Out With the Wounded

Rating:
Summary: Caston's work can be summarized by one word: stunning
Review: I recently saw Anne Caston read at a local event, it is rare in today's world that a person's words can reduce a room of strangers to tears. But without over-sentimentalising her work Caston did just this. She has a way through her narrative poems to touch a nerve in the reader, conveying stories and emotion in an unadorned, straightforward, unpretentious way that combined with brief asides of observation reveal her innermost thoughts and feelings. It can only follow that a reader gets caught in the power of the ideas. Caston has not so much a dark way of writing (her work is far from being light and happy), but a depth of ideas and emotion that stuns me as a reader each time I pick up her book. The way she deals with man's humanity toward man is uplifting even while being pensive. While her poems about nursing are her most well known, she, in this book, displays her breadth of subject through fearless pieces that reveal many of the questions that come to every individual in their own personal way. It's amazing to me that a talent such as this hasn't been more fully embraced. If there is one poetry book you buy in the next year, it should be this FLYING OUT WITH THE WOUNDED.

Rating:
Summary: Caston's work can be summarized by one word: stunning
Review: I recently saw Anne Caston read at a local event, it is rare in today's world that a person's words can reduce a room of strangers to tears. But without over-sentimentalising her work Caston did just this. She has a way through her narrative poems to touch a nerve in the reader, conveying stories and emotion in an unadorned, straightforward, unpretentious way that combined with brief asides of observation reveal her innermost thoughts and feelings. It can only follow that a reader gets caught in the power of the ideas. Caston has not so much a dark way of writing (her work is far from being light and happy), but a depth of ideas and emotion that stuns me as a reader each time I pick up her book. The way she deals with man's humanity toward man is uplifting even while being pensive. While her poems about nursing are her most well known, she, in this book, displays her breadth of subject through fearless pieces that reveal many of the questions that come to every individual in their own personal way. It's amazing to me that a talent such as this hasn't been more fully embraced. If there is one poetry book you buy in the next year, it should be this FLYING OUT WITH THE WOUNDED.

Rating:
Summary: pain & healing
Review: Not so much a review, as a reader's comment... these poems deal with a lot of pain (physical, mental) but more so with healing. The poems themselves had a healing effect on me. I heard Anne read at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival in Sept. '98 and she was quite wonderful. Unassuming, somewhat hesitant, seeming to almost want to cry at her own words. I was moved.