Pointed Sentences

Poetry. "Many poets could write other poets' poems, but there's no one anywhere who could write a Bill Yarrow poem except Bill Yarrow. With a bizarre grace that suggests a truly individual aesthetic, his poems navigate the razor's edge between the polished and the raw. Like a Dadaist version of John Donne, Yarrow takes an axe to common poetic assumptions, yet delivers all the pleasures of poetry at its best." Stephen-Paul Martin "Bill Yarrow is the Sun Tzu of verbal warfare, the Machiavelli of mental strategy. 'Look left, ' he says, and when you look right, anticipating his move, the whiplash hits you from behind. This is a book stolen from the library of the unexpected before it burned. What is it, what is it? A bit of Nicanor Parra's antipoetry, a bit of Vasko Popa's thought experimentation, a bit of Celan's surrealism, a bit of this, a bit of that. As it shifts from allegory to narrative to lyric, you come to understand that this book is not a wonderful beast (part hippopotamus, part threshing machine) but a creature whose parts and attributes are constantly shifting wings when it needs to be an angel, webbed hands for catching baseballs. How wonderful, how fun, and how different from so many volumes of genial, accomplished, and innocuous poetry." Tony Barnstone"