Overview

Leslie Ullman, esteemed American poet, offers the following review of this book. David Hinkhouse's poems call back a world that has nearly faded-a 20tth century world of midwestern prairie towns where everyone knew everyone else and neighbors looked after neighbors, and of small family farms where grandparents and parents taught their offspring the ways of animal husbandry and the value of hard work-a world still untouched when the speaker of these nostalgic poems listened to the new rock 'n roll on a transistor radio while doing his Saturday chores and dreamed of leaving. Now a grandfather, veteran, musician and poet, the speaker resurrects the past as a three-act play and offers it with a seasoned storyteller's deft touch, through vivid characterization and use of detail. This collection is in a sense an elegy to a time and places in America preserved in the works of Thornton Wilder and Edgar Lee Masters. But Escape from Eden is also an ars poetica, as many of the poems depict the highs and lows, the many failures and occasional successes, experienced in a long life of writing; a poem sometimes is a desiccated toad languishing on the side of a hot road, sometimes a rider waving a crop at the sluggish writer, sometimes illusive prey, sometimes wine that needs several seasons in a dark vat in order to age into full flavor. These poem-centered poems manage their extended metaphors freshly and with great skill, they are warmed by humor and gentle self-mockery, and they have much wisdom to offer anyone who, like this writer, has loved poetry all his life, alongside work and family and nature's consoling cycles of dormancy and regeneration. Eden is a capacious, effortlessly entertaining, and ultimately comforting collection.

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