About the Book
The true story of life isn't a set line from birth to death. Life mixes together growths and breaks. It fractures the sun and it carries the moonlight into your bedroom at night. The Review Mirror sets itself apart from reflective poetry using brief lines and large impact. Let Harris take you through life, through every memory, and how one copes with the loss of memory as he approaches the fold of the universe.
PRAISE FOR THE REVIEW MIRROR
Regret? David M. Harris has none. Loss, lost opportunities, unrealized dreams—in the poems in The Review Mirror he uses the perspective of the moment to revisit the past. Wistful, while avoiding sentimentality, he plucks not the choicest but the dearest: Imagine holding and polishing this concise visual image, brought up from a depth and repeated year after year:
. . . teaching the ball and glove to belong together / binding the tools of summer / to their tasks / possibilities and prospects. / Binding myself to baseball. / In March, we are all dreamers.
—“Right Fielder”
We all have memories, few of us can relinquish the subjectivity of original experience. Yet even fewer care enough to set aside that subjectivity and look anew into the mirror that is the self. Memory stimulates us with bygone emotion and in doing, prevents us from seeing what the present offers; the fear of losing past passion prevents us from looking backward with objectively. In several selections it is the present moment igniting the past—a balancing act capturing and holding the reader’s attention. Vignettes drawing me in and confronting me, engendering associations I own completely—this is the poet’s task: describing the edifice by explaining a single stone or timber.
Evocative?
Yes—with a mixture of Latinate roots and Anglo-Saxon tonality—the oral tradition that conjures up poem as song, song as tale, and tale as history. Every story must be a vignette, whether it is fifty words or five thousand pages. Filling five thousand pages with what may be said: this is the easy path; distilling that same message onto a single page—successfully—is the modern poet’s challenge. Mr. Harris meets this challenge and bests it without falling into a tautology of either/or; nor does he merely sift springtime’s cornucopia for kernels of meaning. Considerations of the past inform the present, challenge the future.
Read the rest of the review HERE
. . . teaching the ball and glove to belong together / binding the tools of summer / to their tasks / possibilities and prospects. / Binding myself to baseball. / In March, we are all dreamers.
—“Right Fielder”
We all have memories, few of us can relinquish the subjectivity of original experience. Yet even fewer care enough to set aside that subjectivity and look anew into the mirror that is the self. Memory stimulates us with bygone emotion and in doing, prevents us from seeing what the present offers; the fear of losing past passion prevents us from looking backward with objectively. In several selections it is the present moment igniting the past—a balancing act capturing and holding the reader’s attention. Vignettes drawing me in and confronting me, engendering associations I own completely—this is the poet’s task: describing the edifice by explaining a single stone or timber.
Evocative?
Yes—with a mixture of Latinate roots and Anglo-Saxon tonality—the oral tradition that conjures up poem as song, song as tale, and tale as history. Every story must be a vignette, whether it is fifty words or five thousand pages. Filling five thousand pages with what may be said: this is the easy path; distilling that same message onto a single page—successfully—is the modern poet’s challenge. Mr. Harris meets this challenge and bests it without falling into a tautology of either/or; nor does he merely sift springtime’s cornucopia for kernels of meaning. Considerations of the past inform the present, challenge the future.
Read the rest of the review HERE