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.