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Title: Maine: Poems by Jonah Winter ISBN: 0-9718219-2-5 Publisher: Slope Editions Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: cowboy sestina, god luv him
Comment: Reading this, I had the sensation I was reading excellent, adroit, wry, thing-oriented, deep, and best of all, humorous poetry, yet dragging the book around like a secret stash of pistachio cookies. The hilarious --yet, how does he do it?, melancholy--sestina ostensibly a cowboy's journal, with three or four end words all being BEEF (plural beeves) had me skipping down the halls at work. Other poems such as "Ode to Complexity" declare themselves great by the way in which they seem so universal, joyful, and intelligent. Humor and smarts makes this a good one to get for yourself and for others. Good for Caroline Knox, Dean Young fans.

Rating: 5
Summary: MAINE: The Way Poetry Should Be
Comment: Are you sick of those boring, polished, egocentric journal entries which have been passed off as "poetry" for the past 40 years or so? If so, check out MAINE -- the most dynamic, bizarre, unpredictable collection of poems to be published in several generations. At last: a poet not afraid to have a voice -- or actually, many voices! Avoiding the pitfalls of the various "schools" of poetry, Winter's sometimes wacky, sometimes disturbing persona poems are really out there -- in a good way. With total command of the English language and various poetic forms, this Outsider (where did he come from?) covers more ground than one would think possible in an 80-page book. There are sonnets, sestinas, odes, a whole section of ballads which reference points as disparate as Marshal Dillon, Handel's "Messiah" and icicles clinging to the limbs of frozen lovers... (In general, there is no shortage of erotic imagery in this book, and not the usual sort of Pablum that could have been written by a computer -- this stuff is strong, it's personal, and it's weird.) Geographically, Winter also covers a lot of ground, from New York to the Old West to utterly mythicized desert and northern landscapes. This is an amazing compedium of subject matter, emotions, dramatic voices, poetic approaches and lexicons. And with none of the usual "Me me me" obscurity which isolates most contemporary academic and "language" poetry from a potential readership, you will feel quite welcome in the airy rooms of these superbly original and accessible poems.

Rating: 5
Summary: what? FUN poems?
Comment: In their blurbings for the book, David Lehman and James Tate both write how Jonah Winter has fun with language, form and theme. It's true. He writes sestinas about cowboys, for crying out loud -- for once, content allowed to breathe new hilarious life via form, rather than being crammed into a form or restricted by that form. This is a New York-y book and a New York School-y book, hence Lehman's interest in it I suppose, but don't let that prejudice you. Winter is going in even more strange directions and talking about even more mundane/absurd people and places than O'Hara, Schuyler et al. Cool book.