Famous Persons We Have Known

Richard Robbins

Format
Paperback
Publisher
University of Washington Press
Country
United States
Published
31 January 2000
Pages
88
ISBN
9780910055666

Famous Persons We Have Known

Richard Robbins

In this collection of poems we indeed meet the famous persons promised in the title: Lon Chaney, Jr. buying eggs and bananas at a Capistrano Beach supermarket; Elvis slipping out / with raccoons and owls to buy pink / Cadillacs for anyone that moved him; Marshal Dillon, his head split by a surfing mishap; even Geronimo, galloping back toward nature, ruined for love. But this books is about more than famous people. From the car and kokanee-chocked waters of Montana to an art gallery in Utah where the narrator doesn’t meet a famous poet laureate, Robbins traces his own heritage and ours by connecting past and present, the dead and living. He does so with sly humor, a naturalist’s precision, and a potent lyricism. The cumulative effect is that of a building rhythm that echoes our own trembling relationship to the land that somehow sustains us- because, as the narrator says in Bread, the collection’s final poem, feeding / the hungry is what it’s always all about.

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