City Eclouge part 1

I do not think it would be going too far to call City Eclogue Ed Roberson’s masterpiece. This collection, which reads effectively as a long poem, despite its show of individually titled poems, synthesizes and perfects the poetics Roberson has been working with since he began publishing in 1970. His control of language—or his ability to reveal to us the telling elusiveness of language—has never been stronger, though he draws upon syntactic and metaphoric practices that typify his oeuvre. These poems are lyrical, even in their disjunctive sentences; intimately conversational, even in their determined orientation toward the page. He gives us the opportunity to see the cities that have formed his personal landscape through widening lenses that clarify their beauty and their ugliness, lenses that aren’t so much new as newly polished with the soft, insistent cloth of Roberson’s political and aesthetic sensibilities. City Eclogue is actually pretty incredible. Ed Roberson is what happens when multiculturalism meets avante-garde. He has this incredible way of getting the most out of each word, using both its figurative and literal meaning in service of the poem, and he multiplies possibilities of meaning without taking away from the poem's purpose. If all opposites in poetry (highbrow vs. lowbrow, accessibility vs. "experimental") could find a perfect balance together, then they've done so in this book. At first I was completely lost at first reading City Eclogue. But after rereading certain parts multiple times over. It all began to smoothly fall into place.