Armored Hearts: Selected & New Poems

Rating:
Summary: where's the music?
Review: although i like the subject matter here, i've got to say i'm not sure why this writer chose to write poems, other than the fact that each piece is short. one could write these as prose poems and it wouldn't really change the reading of the pieces. and too many poems begin like this: 'alone on a hill above the festival, I listen past field noise' . . . I listen, I hear, I see. I.I. I.I. too much of the romantic bluster that I suppose is supposed to be a sort of Whitmanesque/ deep-image conflation but feels self-conscious. I love some of the poems, don't get me wrong, some wonderful images swirl up as the imagination confronts nature in this book. But I wish the poet played with perspective more. and I wish I got more of a feeling of music from the line breaks, which seem awfully arbitrary to me.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful poetry
Review: Armored Hearts is a selection of poems from David Bottoms' first three books, plus a new book-length addition. Bottoms came on the poetry scene in 1979 when his first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was selected by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His early poems are strongly narrative and very accessible, but still work wonderfully on the figurative level. Very frequently they show us how myth touches us in our everyday lives. Two of my favorites are "Under the Boathouse" and "Under the Vulture-Tree." At their best, which is frequently, Bottoms poems are stunning. Some of the finest work to come out of the south in the last 20 years.

Rating:
Summary: Top 25
Review: This books was recently chosen by Georgia Center for the Book as one of the top 25 books by Georgians. Indeed, it's a fine book of poems by one of the South's most powerful voices. Super poems from Bottoms' first four books.