Review by Booklist Review
The Bloomington Community Orchard must have spread its roots into Ross Gay, an Indiana University English professor, as the organic poems in his third collection bear fruit, line by line, with each fresh word or phrase. These are accessible, alive poems that give one the sense of sitting and talking in the poet's kitchen. Often vulnerable and self-conscious in tone, they dig deep in the dirt of memory and unearth powerful images. In Burial, the speaker adds his father's ashes to the soil while planting a plum tree, and he sees his mother as a bison, dragging her hooves through the ash / of her heart, in c'mon! Whether by contemplating the extraordinary within everyday acts (sleeping in clothes, drinking water, buttoning and unbuttoning a shirt), or by entwining past and present as he pays homage to parents, friends, even his former love, Gay embraces the natural cycles of life and death as only an introspective gardener and accomplished poet can.--St. John, Janet Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gay (Bringing the Shovel Down) drops a third collection that follows through on its title's promise: these simple, joyful poems read like a litany of what's good in the world. Fig trees are high on the list, along with friendship and the act of appreciation itself. "I am grateful," he writes in the title poem. "I just want us to be friends now, forever./ Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden./ The sun has made them warm./ I picked them just for you." Gay welcomes readers into his garden-for playful strolls, for the work of pruning and harvesting-to bear witness to a mind working its hardest to appreciate the world. He assumes the presence of an "ancestor who loved you/ before she knew you." Gay's incessant positivity takes a toll even on him, as evidenced by his occasional lament that he can't actually feel gratitude about or make beauty from the worst things in life. In a poem about a deceased friend, he admits, "I swore when I got into this poem I would convert/ this sorrow into some kind of honey." Gay is known for his exuberant live readings, and though these poems don't translate perfectly to the page, they're inspiring nonetheless. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
