Review of Counting Bricks by Gary Metras

Mnemonic sentiment, boiled down to its essential, tear-charged elements, cannot be ignored. It drives human nature. It mobilizes the emotions. It guides our unruly impulses toward goodness. Poets who completely excise sentimentality from their art do so at their own peril. Thankfully, Gary Metras is not one of those poets.

 Metras, in his new poetry collection, Counting Bricks, injects physical awe and unusual detail into the ordinariness of passion and its rolling tides of melancholy and elation. His precise, yet down-to-earth, verbiage contains and grounds any unseemly maudlin excess. For more of my review of Counting Bricks go here: https://dougholder.blogspot.com/2026/09/counting-bricks-poems-by-gary-metras.html