Heroes

Out Of Print ... The heroes of these poems drive a car to the top of a mountain for a dare, dance along the polished surface of a bar, egged on by the crowd. For the most part they are anonymous or lost to us now like Stepn Fetchit, the bit part player in a hundred forgotten B-movies. But there are other heroes here, too, swifts and sharks, a great grey shrike with prey in its beak, a caged bear and gorilla whose eyes are mirrors to our own, a pheasant streaming the gold embers of its tailcreatures, like ourselves, caught between celebration and the need to go on. After his excursion into contemporary urban life in the prose-and-poetry sequence The City (also available), John Barnie returns in Heroes to the world of nature, but nature as revealed by Darwin, which forces us to ask the old question all over again, Who, and what, are we The City is a book of interweaving voices and characters a challenging, inventive and accomplished work of prose and poetry. David Lloyd, World Literature Today