Easy

Roland Flint beckons us in a voice inclusive and reassuring to come see the everyday world. In Easy, Flint speaks of gratitude for whatever is good, true, and simple, though one suspects such gratitude is not simply or easily acquired. There is a gentleness, if not always in the subjects of these poems, then in their telling and in their reception. "What is laughter to cure cancer? / or to surprise a darkness like grief/ so that you guiltily clap your mouth?" ("Haha"). "If the colors of spring are no / brighter, as to Williams's widow, / they are no less bright, or fine / to me, despite my sorrowing, / seeing them, you are gone" ("Tom"). Flint's fluid penetration of diverse people and matters -- manual laborers, the next-door neighbor teaching his son to ride a bike, Allen Tate, cooking, gardening, marriage, popular culture, the link/rivalry between laughter and sex, poetry itself -- does not descend to the mysterious, difficult, or esoteric; people and life, pure and simple, yield bald-faced truths and exquisite riches of insight enough. Easy is a marvelous lyrical gems of honest and wry delight in what we mistake as commonplace.

paper 0-8071-2262-9 The seventh book by the retired Georgetown professor advertises itself truthfully: its easy-going, easily understood, and full of easy rhythms and rhymes. As the title poem about his happy marriage avers, how / easy it is, the times like this, when its simple. Flints plain and folksy verse stays true to its humble intentions: in short-line forms, ballads, odes, and elegies, he records moments of joy. Take the Moment: Thursday Aubade remembers a lyrical time in Perugia, on his wedding anniversary, with a worker singing outside; in Windfall from Edna Millay, hes amazed by an actual windfall of apples in a field; Strawberries like Raspberries describes the wonderful fruit of economically depressed Bulgaria; and Henry & June the Movie defends the sexiness of its female leads against criticism. Sex is often a laughing matter for Flint: Never Again Would Birdsong is a ditty about the link between laughter and orgasm, which Flint expounds upon at length in HaHa, a poem that plays on the Old English roots of the word laugh. Raised in the austere Midwest, Flint recalls his mothers difficult life in a few poems; and maintains a simple faith (And it was good) and a belief in the virtues of labor (Do You Have an Extra Saw). His ode to friendship (Pamela) is further supported by his own elegies for Tom, with whom he shared the ordinary passages of time. Flints humility doesnt prevent flights of fanciful glory: he prays for literary fame, since However small. The work is all. Verse so genial its easy to overlook its flaws. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.