Stewart Conn
Description
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Conn's self-selected retrospective is as impressive a presentation of this substantial poet as will probably ever be made."" --Bo
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oklist starred review ""An author's Collected Poems carries a sense of finality which is not present in a Selected Poems, which suggests that there is more to come, and I certainly hope that this will be the case with Stewart Conn. ...Stewart Conn possesses a genuinely lyrical Scottish voice, which he makes universally appealing."" --World Literature Today.
From Booklist
Conn's self-selected retrospective is as impressive a presentation of this substantial poet as will probably ever be made. Conn sorts some 35 years' worth of poems into seven untitled groups. Common subject matters are family life, traveling (especially in Scotland, Conn's homeland), and painting and the other plastic arts. Friendship and human sympathy inform and characterize virtually every poem: it is hard to imagine a more appealing poetic persona than Conn's. Particular subjects memorably include Conn's great uncle, a sturdy farmer and World War I veteran; Renoir's
The Luncheon of the Boating Party, the real-life models for whose figures Conn deftly conjures in a suite of interior monologues; Soweto in 1984; and scenes from Conn's Ayrshire childhood. Conn's elder colleague, the late Iain Crichton Smith, observed the "ghosts of rhymes" in Conn's poems. In tandem with the rhythms, though not scansions, of the stanzas (quatrains, sestets, etc.) Conn habitually uses, those ghosts suggest Conn's winningly wise attitude toward the world: that it is beautiful and precious, but also rather frail, held together for humanity by acts of love.
Ray Olson
From Kirkus Reviews
Thematically grouped poemssome new, others from the eight books published by Scottish poet Conn between 1967 and 1995that make for satisfying reading. A lyric interest in nature, travel, and fine arts predominates here, narrated in a strong voice refreshingly sure of itself and its perceptionseven in the childhood meditations on Ayrshire farm life (I once came across a pack of stoats in the sunlight, / their eyes like jewels, the tips of their tails black / . . . . / Knowing what I do now, I wouldnt have stood there / watching, imagining them such dainty playthings). At their most engaging, these poems present an interesting permutation of style: highly romantic, almost Burnsian, they stand in the tradition of the bards but are firmly grounded nevertheless in the realities of 20th-century life. In Marriage a Mountain Ridge, for example, Conn concludes that Later, victims of Time and Loss, / we will return and gaze there / and marvel at such heights / conquered, such blazing air. In Recovery the poet glimpses the intellects finery / and pulsing beneath, / those massive forces, / endurance and love. Much of the drama of Conns work consists in reportage (from what the models thought in posing for Renoirs The Luncheon of the Boating Party to scenes of travel in Europe and South Africa) that offers a vivid and rhythmic version of daily life. The poems in the last section tend to flatten out and grow closer to prose. Overall, however, these are the poems of a companionable, educated man whose world-vision is well worth sharing.--
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