Fawn Bones

For Richard Sommer the business of a poem is not to persuade to the truth of an idea or to generalize on experience, but to play with the facts of experience and to play one idea against another. An evocative collection, these are poems that offer, in a variety of emotional ranges, a deep sense of the connections between inter human experience, artistic expression, and the natural world. Sommer serves as a volunteer game warden in the Eastern Townships of Quebec during poaching season, a dangerous, but for him, necessary, undertaking. Fawn Bones is, in part, the result of a poet standing between nature and lawlessness.

AUTHOR

Richard Sommer

Richard Sommer taught poetry writing at Montreal?s Concordia University for many years, served for three decades as a volunteer game warden in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and led a citizens? environmental group in a seven-year battle, ultimately successful, to save the Townships? Pinnacle Mountain from developers. Sommer?s previous books of poetry include Homage to Mr. Macmullin, Blue Sky Notebook, left hand mind, Milarepa, The Other Side of Games, Selected and New Poems, Fawn Bones, and The Shadow Sonnets. In 2004 Sommer was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and the verse journal, Cancer Songs, has been an important part of his response to this challenge. He lives on a dirt road outside Frelighsburg with his wife of more than forty years, dance improvisationalist, teacher, and artist Victoria Tansey. They have three grown children, three grandchildren, and currently three cats.

Reviews

“Sommer’s poems often yoke disparate ideas together in ways that are subtle and elusive. He is most effective when firmly rooted in flesh and blood. In one poem he suggests commemorating the highway deaths of animals by putting up little cardboard signs stating “ANIMAL DEATH HERE,” until the highways are littered with them. In another poem the speaker and a woman examine their bodies and converse intimately, not sexually; an epiphany links flesh to earth in a fashion reminiscent of the Metaphysical poets: I have smelled your skin in the sun itself striking earth and entering. Our conversation ended itself this way, in natural grace and deep sensing. And, of course, never ends.” —Canadian Literature