Political Cactus Poems

By Jonathan Skinner

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974318116
• ISBN13: 9780974318110
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Palm Press
• Length: 108 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 0.3" x 4.8"

Customer Reviews

Political Action Poems

I saw Jonathan Skinner read from this book and I bought a copy from him, thumbing it on the way home to re-read the poems that had especially struck me during the reading. That must have been a year ago or more, and yet I often return to this book, drawn to it like a magnet, its bright blue cover a sky cloud for my many moods. At the reading he played us birdsongs he'd recorded himself at many vacation spots around the world, but I don't think you'd need to hear them before identifying a certain amount of his verse as birdsong inspired, a mimic in an underworld of poetry, for we are all under the birds in one way or another. That's the "Little Dictionary of Sounds," a collection of brief lyrics that recall something of the compression and simplicity of the late Larry Eigner. Another series of poems comes accompanied by greyscale photos of some intriguing, biomorphic constructions by sculptor Isabelle Pelissier, each reduced to thumbnail size, manageable, collectible even. These are the political cactus poems themselves, or at least a taste of them, for there's a subtitle that says "A to E." Makes you think that there might be a second volume with "F to Z." Sometimes the poems seem peeled from botanical description labels at the municipal gardens; elsewhere a wilder derivation suggests itself. Under alphabetical order a useful progression is sometimes obscured, but am I crazy, I thought I felt it going on in these poems. In so many ways this book has made itself an essential tool, almost a field guide. When he first announced his plans to devote his life to "ecopoetics," I have to confess I didn't have the foggiest. Two things made me see the light, Jake Gyllenhall in THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW of course, and secondly Skinner's own POLITICAL CACTUS POEMS, in the title of which CACTUS is a nonceword for ACTION. I'm guessing that if this book got around more, and more people bought it, we'd see a greener world and less devastastion.