Shocking the Dark

In an impressive variety of verse forms, Robert Lowes employs craft as an engine that drives a restless and penetrative sensibility. What is well finished here in metric and metaphor is likely to be unsatisfied with the mere finish of surfaces. For example, he considers paintings in two history-haunted ekphrastic sequences. One exposes the grim ironies that attend a portrait of Robert E. Lee. The other conjures the artistic vision of Paul Klee, joining the poet's imagination to the painter's to read in the canvases the beginnings of a brutal era. Lowes looks at ceremonies, secular and religious-a class reunion, communion, a road trip with talk-radio accompaniment-to go beyond the offered meanings for what more things can mean, can be revealed to have meant, can be made to mean. Above all, he offers us a poetry of value because it values, examines, assesses; it is a poetry of song and conscience.

-Jason Sommer, author of Portulans

Robert Lowes's Shocking the Dark begins with mystics and fly balls: "those sprints / to the right place / in the first place." Later, he holds up another "catch," praising "the jewel-like greens and blues/of shingled scales . . . conquests, not gifts." Throughout, we witness possession and persecution, poems that shock even the dark. Lowes analyzes chaos through varied form-pantoums, sonnets, free verse, ghazals, couplets, haiku, a series on Paul Klee, whose late paintings "prophesied . . . the Holocaust." But do not despair: there's enough hope, faith, and humor to light the way.

-Marjorie Maddox, author of Begin with a Question

This book might have been titled after one of its poems, "Divine Regret," for registering the world's sublime beauty, mixed as it is with the seemingly unnecessary pain and error built into it. These poems, beating with a liturgical rhythm of thought, illuminate, delay, perhaps even push back the dark, be it nightfall, injustice, or death. Lowes is aware of gaps. Gaps between doubter and tradition, between art and its context, between reader and writer, created and creator. And so this collection crackles with irony-but also with acts of creation, acknowledgment, acceptance, and gratitude.

-Chuck Sweetman, author of Enterprise, Inc.