| Charles Semones' poems communicate
a vivid sense of both human loneliness and human
connectedness, and especially a sense of kinship and
community across time and generations. I am especially
taken by the feeling for significant landscape, for the
companionship with hounds, the narratives of travel and
meditations on craft, such as "Thomas Eakins Talks
to Himself Before Painting The Swimming Hole."
But I am most taken by the assured voice and craft of the
poems themselves. --Robert Morgan Wind
Publications |
 Hard Love Wind Publications, 1994, 73 pages, $10.00. What
predominates in Semones' Hard Love
is a sense of loss and of the difficulty of love. Here
are poems about the struggle to remain, to hold to what
must be held to, to do what must be done, to remember and
to grieve, and occasionally to accomplish love, though it
is hard. Here are poems frequently cast in long, ample
lines populated by boys, hounds, the ghosts of the dear
and not too dearly departed, by the denizens of Deep
Creek-- and by angels. In them, a lone consciousness
longs for what is often not to be, and yet carries on
with dignity and acceptance-- and sometimes a savage
flare of anger. Together these poems create a private
Kentucky of the heart, often moonlit and lonely, but
"holding place," and unstinting of the real.
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