Description

Robert Farnsworth has sought to write poems that "simultaneously think and sing." His poems are meditative and musical with measured pace. The landscape of northern New England, "the Atlantic's edge," is central to the vision of this book. It becomes a living phenomenon with human qualities: "honest water"; "strong water"; a landscape that has "diminished and forgiven him." He writes sometimes in melancholy about human affairs: "a common durable sadness," "a language of loss, of everything unassuaged," "a thousand discouragements," "the underwater light/that comes before a storm." And often of quiet memory, "imagination's tender lens," and of anticipation, "the love your empty dress is promising." Honest Water is a book of steadily evolving power. "Farnsworth's formidable descriptive powers alone would recommend his poems to us but it's what he builds from observation-a vision, as we like to say-that distinguishes this extraordinary book"-- William Matthews "Farnsworth has the ability to come to experience immediately as a first cause-with potential for both argument and narrative-and to create resonance without sacrificing the rational. It's a rare poet who can think through the emotion of an experience and allow that process a full hearing, in a language of wit and discovery. I can't think of another young poet so capable, at once, of conviction and irony and sustained interest in the imagination." --Stanley Plumly