Rogue Hemlocks

"Poet Carl Martin's literal and figurative "Brit vernacular" asks of its reader nothing less than a total ignorance of expectation. These poems, coming after a long silence - Martin's first book, appeared in 1991, and his second in 1998 - engage Romantic tropes such as Vision, Beauty, and the Self cheek-by-jowl with a Pop madness and a Modern despair, all in a high cadence that is winkingly isolate, stunningly productive. Martin's allusions and affinities are to and with Olympians of aesthetic conduct: Tolstoy, Maxfield Parrish, Jean Genet, Maeterlinck, Kate Moss, Peter Pan, the Green Man. These lines are marbled through with the Real, and buffed by an apprehension so alert to Unreality as to be downright illuminating."--Jacket.