Wishbone by Don Share

Wishbone Reviews

• 
  Jacqueline Valencia

  I rarely write reviews. As a reader, I have been very fortunate to have digested some great prose this year. Unfortunately, I don't always have the time to sit down and elucidate my views and feelings on the books I have loved.
  
  I am happy to say that I do have a bit of a moment for that today.
  
  Don Share's Wishbone is a poetry collection infused with a magnetic flow of clear, but biting language. Impressed by the way the prose danced in my head I found myself reading most of it out loud just to take in the full sounds of the spirited rhythms that were manifesting in my mind.
  
  Me *reading 'On Radical Hope'*: "Like a child who feverishly draws/Happy houses, one after the other,/I don't mind if the culpa is all mea:/The crow of plenty caws,/I can't father anyone the way you mother..."
  
  My son: "What are you doing?"
  
  Me: "Reading poetry."
  
  My son: "Shhhh."
  
  Me: "I'm trying! Sometimes though you have to read things like this."
  
  My son: "Like singing?"
  
  Me: "Exactly."
  
  Some of the themes in Wishbone hit close to home for me that I sat for a bit letting them set (sifting them, if you will) in their own way in my head: the struggles of nature, humanity, the every day lament of age, and passing of time. Of course, at the moment, I am in the middle of some heavy meditation in zen, so it is unsurprising that I will find or spin koans from anything. It is to be expected in this journey. Wishbone, however, is filled with welcomed periods of respite and discerning turns of phrase that it kept me both enthralled and amused.
  
  "Sitting Buddha/or shitting Buddha?/The Emperor Claudius/dreams incessantly of fireflies..."
  
  Thank you, Mr. Share, for Wishbone. The words were most needed at that time. They gelled really well with my current state of mind.
  
  I look forward to adventuring through more of Don Share's texts in the very near future and you should too.
• 
  Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press

  "Don Share's work is compressed as a haiku, intent as a tanka, witty as a sonnet, witless as a song, relentless as an exposé, patter without pretension . . . his elegant poetry, exposed as a haiku, expansive as a renga, boisterous as a bridge, happy as Delmore Schwartz with Lou Reed and vice versa, vivacious as the living day . . . built out of attention, music and sight."
  —David Shapiro
  
  "The poet's awareness of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness."
  —Tom Sleigh
  
  "Share is one of the more gifted craftsmen we have writing in America today."
  —Erin Belieu, Boston Review
  
  "[Don Share] is sage and deeply hilarious."
  —Ed Park
  
  "Few poets manage such dexterous and fresh music."
  —Alice Fulton
• 
  Steven Critelli

  Unmistakable is the adult sensibility with which Don Share shares his world with us. It is intelligently appreciative of the particulars of life, the beauty that still manages to break its way into our protective shells and surprise us, and yet painfully aware of how fragile that beauty is. Share walks in a world that is all too familiar to us, one that often leaves us battleworn, bloodied but unbowed.
• 
  Jennifer

  Humorous and heartbreaking, the poems in Wishbone reveal one man trying to make sense of his world. Twisting Rilke, the poet wants to know, "Who among the angels would hear me/if I started screaming my head off?" We hear, loud and clear. This collection reaches us where we live.
• 
  Proustitute (on hiatus)

  Share's new collection shows just as much debt to tradition, formalism, the influence of philosophy on a writing life, and the chain of poetic influence as it displays an innovative and unique poetics very much in tune with contemporary life. A wonderful example of this fusion of the old and the new is "Ready for a Psalm of My Own"; here, Share uses loose iambic pentameter while describing city life and the chaos of hypermodernity: "What language do you speak / into your iPhone?" In Share's hands, history and philosophy are also placed under a modern day microscope as in "Magna Carta":
  
  My umbrella
  isn't worth
  the paper
  it's written on.
  
  There are also some very short poems here which seem to be a poetics of urgency in that hustle and bustle world distilled to lines one might scan. These shorter poems are often prescient and deeply resonant: in one after Rilke, entitled "Hwaet," Share invokes Rilke's metaphysical form of angelic interrogation in order to receive even mere fragments of divine truth, and Share then subverts this with a very physical and almost Munchian image of despair:
  
  Who among the angels would hear me
  if I started screaming my head off?
  
  "Bowling on the Day of Atonement" is a short elegy that proves a poem's economy and its powerful images are often enough to convey what "news" a poem has to offer, to bring William Carlos Williams's famous phrase to mind. In "Bowling...," Share gives us anecdote and then poetic closure:
  
  My old man used to say
  a little rain never hurt anybody.
  
  There were downpours
  at his funeral.
  
  Wishbone is a stellar collection that showcases an important contemporary poet "Rustling / in my own / silks" as Share elegantly puts it in "Poetry." There is autobiography, an interrogation of language and meaning, questions posed to the great poets of the past as well as the iconographic discord between images of the past and the present, there are lines and turns of phrase that will stick with the reader long after finishing the collection—in short, Wishbone is wise, witty and occasionally so poetically sacriligious ("I wonder if Emily Dickinson knew / about Chicken Little?" Share muses in "Ballad of the Foolish Man") that all poets and readers of contemporary poetry would do well to read and savor it slowly.
• 
  Mark

  Some poems I enjoyed from it included:
  
  On Smoking Out Some Bees w/ a Flaming Torch, On Screaming Your Head Off, On Imaginary and Scarecrow Sins at Home, On Fixing Things, On Being Philosophical, Stonecrop, Another Long Poem, Die Welt is so Verkehrt, Poetry, Eclipse, Symbiosis, To the Sister I Never Had, Flip Flops and Mary Janes, Carp Ascending a Waterfall, Fantasia on Rapture, Lines Written During Harvest Time.
  
  And the poem I'll choose to share is... "Eclipse":
  
  Her comma-like
  eye-
  brows.
  
  Simple legs in milk-
  white flame,
  plush.
  
  Directly
  the night
  sky,
  
  shy
  of its planets,
  furrows
  
  its distant
  lemons,
  and tilts.
  
  One
  of your ancestors
  must have read
  
  a forbidden book.