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Title: Sinking Creek by John Engels ISBN: 1-55821-638-3 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Sinking Creek: Recollections of an Old Man
Comment: This time of year seems very appropriate when it comes to reading John Engels recent collection of poetry, Sinking Creek. During my reading of the poems in this collection, I gained a sense of a man who has been through many changes in his life, most of which were not for the better. Many of the poems in this collection deal with a harsh change that seems to have taken place, either in the poets or the poets inner voice's, lives. Such topics as death, divorce, chronic illness, and growing older reappear inside the bodies of Engels works. Such reappearance's, though, isn't uncommon for poetry. The style of which Engels expresses these difficult changes is uncommon. The placement of the poems in this book is where Engels cleverness stands out the most. Most of the poems in the beginning of the book illume to intense feelings with little details. By the end of the book, however, the reader is bombarded with details that begin to shed some light on the poet's past and give new meaning to the first two sections of poetry. The reading of this book left me with the impression that the writer was an old man telling me about the many changes he had to go through in life. Like most older people whose' memories are cloud, it seems to take the writer a while to bring things into focus. The author I get the feeling early that the person, who wrote the poetry, was in the golden years of their life. This aspect gave each poem a very human feel to their subjects. Add in a really good grasp of natural surroundings, and it is hard to not be moved by some of these works. Like I stated before, each poem tackles some major conflict in a way that mixes the natural world with emotional aspects being reviewed by an older person. Poems, such as Stove Cleaning and Stink bring up visions of the decaying elements of nature, which seem to describe the deep regret or emotions harbouring inside of the writer's soul. Both of these poems, in fact, seem to describe the writer's relationship with his father. In Stove Cleaning, the writer talks about an old stove oven that had been in his childhood home. The talk about fire and how it had died out left me with a feeling that the writer had a very troubled past. In the poem Stink, things became clearer when the writer described the rocky relationship with his father in more detail. The poems seemed almost interlocked due to the use of similar language, with the use of the words seventy years (seems to be the writer's current age). As for the use of nature references themselves, the whole book seems to be an ode to autumn almost. The summer season is the embodiment of vitality and a man in their prime. Winter time, in contrast, can be seen as a metaphor of persons in the twilight of their lives. Considering autumn is the transition period from summer to winter, it seems to make sense to make this the largest metaphor of the book (comparing this aspect to getting older). At Summers End is a great example of the writer's attempt at making sense of this transition. I liked this collection mainly because of Engels attempts of trying to reflect on his past and what the over all meaning of each event is. After my first reading of this collection, I looked back into my own past for a while and realised that, even though I haven't lived as long as the voice of the poems, I can relate with them none the less. The language Engels used inside the body of these works was clear and concise. I didn't have to think to hard before getting a grasp of what the author was saying. This has been a very thought provoking experience for me and a book I would like to read again when I'm in my forties, just to see how much more the verses relate with my expanded volumes of life experiences. The feeling I was left with after reading this book reminds me of a novel I had to read in high school called Our Town. A feeling of gaining a better understanding the world as you age, and the feeling of the more question you answer, the more of them seem to appear.