Even on Parnassus

In EVEN ON PARNASSUS, his third collection of verse, Lawrence Cottrell picks his way along life's marches with the deftness of one used to walking knife edges, each step a delicious cleave of soul, the poetic witness by a man unable to avert his gaze from potters' shards or starlit pasts breaking on strands of self. These rhymes are, succinctly, a lyrical pilgrimage along and through the sun and shade of wild countries of the ineffable, sighs painted by a cosmos come upon itself within a looking glass, time cobbled by a marrow to asylums of iambic.

The most rare thing in poetry is a distinct voice, which is something Lawrence Cottrell has in spades. In EVEN ON PARNASSUS, the reader is treated to a linguistic journey, from ancient to medieval to rural American influences. This collection is a superb exploration of the effects of time, the emotional realization of mortality. Cottrell expertly ties his themes of loss, temporal regret, and spiritual concerns together by celebrating eons with the blended language of reclaimed vocabulary, personal experience, and memory (which is, 'this farthing of a vanished age'). When the Immortal Muses fly from Mount Parnassus to Appalachia, they visit this poet who both mocks and rues the passage of every lost moment . . .--David B. Prather

Poetry.