Philip Burnham murmurs
his subdued poems to us as if they were delicate miracles of nature or
intricate tidal secrets. And many of them are. His poetic techniques, although
traditional, are never overbearing and Burnham’s rhymes, off-rhymes, and near
rhymes flow easily and unforced. The poet’s persona captures you with his
likeability and does a masterful job conveying love, loss, and mortality
through images of the natural world and an extraordinary perception of the
ordinary and touchable implements of time and place.
The sonnet, Fog
at Round Pond, Maine, fittingly introduces this collection. Boats become
personified vessels of dreams, which either strain at life’s moorings or lay
low in hibernation. Burnham begins this way,
See how the boats
are compass to the wind,
Bows pointed east
toward Muscongus Bay,
Taut on their
moorings, slipped against the play
Of tides, their
line as of a single mind…
A bit of color
can change everything. So the poet seems to suggest in his poem, Waiting for
the Red-winged Blackbirds. We leave the dark and passive monotony of winter and
enter into the staccato of rebirth. And with this rebirth comes a subtle
intimation of danger. Burnham describes the commotion,
For more of my review of Shore Lines by Philip E. Burnham Jr. go here:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2013/01/poems-from-waters-edge-by-philip.html
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