Grand Canyon and Other Selected Poems

Greg Kosmicki’s review of Grand Canyon and Other Selected Poems, by Amil Quail

There are two great rivers in this new book from Black Star Press, by Amil Quayle, Grand Canyon and other Selected Poems—the river that runs through the Canyon and the river that flows through his love for his family. There is also a great tributary off the Colorado in this book, we might call the Jeremiad River, for Quayle in many poems is nothing if he is not an ancient voice, a prophet standing over the deep crevasse of our American Way of Life, calling us to turn from our evil ways back to the earth. Hell, he even looks like an Old Testament prophet.

An Amil Quayle poem will take you back again and again to a time in this country that is no more—his poems are compendiums of objects and rituals and tasks and relationships that we no longer do and few of us younger than 70 will even understand.

This is a poet who grew up by water, was tested by water, found his spirit by water, lost his brother to water, located his life on the water, made lifelong friends on water, lost his wife and friends to water, and then, for reasons only an old boatman may know, changed course and abandoned water—but still he wrote his poems, poems that give one a heady sense of being on a river run with this skilled poet, the rush of the world safely navigated by his sure hand.

The river run of the life of this poet has not been an easy one, and like a river run, it was the difficult running of the Upset Rapids in his life that earned this poet his hard-earned wisdom. For he is wise enough now as a grandpa to give better advice to his grandkids than mine ever did, tender enough to write love poems both to the land and the tough survivors of an urban moonscape, tough enough to know when he’s in a treacherous place and that he has the grit to stick it out.

One could do worse than be a reader of Quayle.