Charlotte Songs
“Many of us admire Paul Pines’ work as poet, novelist, and memoirist. In “Charlotte Songs,” these three gifts come together. Here he is the singer of Charlotte, who is asked in the penultimate poem to check one of the following with regard to publication of the book: “I need to think about it”; “No!”; “I don’t want to deal with this now (or ever)”; and “Go For It Daddy!” I say, “Go For It!””
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“Inexcusable!”
““Remember this,” the poet tells himself as he races his “little girl”: “what is a memory that anticipates itself / a recollection / that becomes / the ground on which the present plays.” And we follow, drawn along a “golden thread” between father and daughter that is at once binding and unwinding, the reweave of every Charlotte’s Web. Here are poems, in the language of the luminous moment, full of the timeless, of time’s surprise, of all that enraptures, all that sorrows, all that joys. ”
“The great themes—like Love, Death and Family— have inspired masterpieces and, alas, Hallmark Cards. In “Charlotte Songs,” Paul Pines celebrates his daughter. But, if you want the Hallmark Card version of fatherhood, you’ve come to the wrong place. Pines gives us the full paradox of living with his child as she grows from toddler to young woman. Inventive, humorous, baffling and poignant.”
REVIEWED
I'm moved by this review of Charlotte Songs, my latest collection from Marsh Hawk Press, in the Portraits in Poetry section of the American Book Review. Hasanthika Sirisena's piece, Masked, caught what could so easily be missed by a less insightful reader.
“I’ll admit that when I first picked up Paul Pines’s latest poetry collection I didn’t truly appreciate its subversiveness... It was only when I realized how rare such tributes are that I began to understand the true importance of these spare, elegant poems.”
— Hasanthika Sirisena, American Book Review
My gratitude for this.
-- Paul