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Book Review: The Simple Men by David Troupes


David Troupes
Two Ravens Press, 2012. Poetry.
Review by Debrah Lechner

David Troupes is an American writer and artist living in England whose work also includes illustration and the online comic Buttercup Festival. His artistic training resonates in these poems that often illuminate the natural world and the place the human within it. His imagery is concentrated upon the movement and impact of each image. Sometimes the form is simple and narrow, following one focal point to another in an immediate style. “Irony Is a Winding Sheet”: 


Across the dusk lawn young
girls chase,

pale in their dresses,
slight as moths

lifting
in the dark.

O
there is a voice, it articulates love

patiently
like a rabbit with its necklace of wolf.

In contrast to the transparency of some of these austere and vivid pieces, there are others in which the lyricism is dense and verdant, warm and enfolding, as in this excerpt from the poem “Down the Corduroy Road”:

…Balancing
across blow-downs over brooks and from oak
to island oak until at last we saw the road,
what must have been the road:
a bog-tunnel, guttered with squelch,
and strewn with logs and limbs
at rot, the florid green rot of the forest at work.
Curved like a railway cutting and dressed
with fans of spruce, it was unmistakable
in its wrongness, that first long corridor of sight.

Parsimony was the first collection of poetry Troupes published through Two Ravens Press. The Simple Men is the second. There are five poems in this collection dedicated to simple men that mark the path the collection covers. The Simple Men was dedicated to Troupe's father.
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