Title: THE PEAR TREE'S WINTER
Author: Robert Thompson
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, New York

Robert Thompson's poems have many admirable qualities, chief among them: a light touch. Alight touch is only admirable when it goes against the grain, when it is something more than willful fun'n games, or mere whimsy, when it undermines solemnity without sacrificing attention. His poems make me think of John Martin's watercolors, of Miles Davis in a lyrical mood, of James Schuyler's deft poems, where "light" means luminous as well as insouciant. Thompson's poems are less daily, less journalistic than Schuyler's and his sense of self is diffused in the gentle charm of how he writes rather than in the specific content of what he writes about.

Like other New York poets, poets in New York, Thompson must find a way to respond adequately to the lacerating edginess of the urban. This he does with a diffident but not indifferent, slightly askew, slightly surreal diction, the effect of which is like someone whistling a tune in the midst of a traffic jam. To hear these poems, then, is to be briefly less distracted, or rather to be reminded of the glad things that slip accidentally into each of our days, shifting our point of view from enterprise to surprise: "I love you, thunder and rain: take me shopping." One could say that Thompson brings to the city an antithetical nature, an internalized quietude and observance, which he allows to mingle with the discordant hubbub. Neither quiet nor hubbub is sacrificed: they mate happily in a muted embrace.

Ann Lauterbach