Books by the Lake

Just as in the collection that followed this one, False Clues, Ron Schreiber comes across as a very likable guy, writing warmly about friends and wistfully about lovers, and with a rather tentative reflectiveness about his displacement in society and his anxious internal changes. The last few poems in the book seemed particularly striking to me, with their questioning of marriages and their attempts to think about relationships in a new way. All the poems are very personal, where he sounds like he’s talking to himself most of the time, or to someone very close. There isn’t much formal structure at all to most of these poems, mostly the words just seem to spill out. But he’s trying to shape his lines, as he says:

this rhythm.   slow movement of lines across a page.
not jays leaping from tree to stream bank back to tree.
more like gulls over the beach, no place to land
because of people walking there in couples, trailing behind their dogs.