Brad Fairchild

Nominative Gestures: Pigeons and Centers: Poems from a Month Abroad Brad Fairchild

An elegant, eloquent journey abroad through verse and photo that makes you want to get your passport out immediately, dig up some cheap plane tickets online, and head for the airport. This is one creative endeavor that proves three heads are better than one.-Brandon Judell, New York Theatre Wire"This is no mere Jamesian Baedeker in verse form where clumsy and insensitive American sensibility collides with European culture and misses all the grace notes. Nor is it a cold Michelin guide book lacking heart and soul. These poems, filled with the traditional and non-traditional landmarks and landscapes of Paris and Italy, transform classical cold marble, ancient ruins, and rustic villas into resonant and shimmering snapshots of places and people infused with the yearnings, wit, and joys of the two poets."Whether it is Brad's evocation of a past love haunting his footsteps as he revisits old landmarks or Larry's sense of serenity and balance against the torque of age, this poetic tour guides the reader through the hearts of these two poets and the souls of the countries they visit."The personal and the historical merge in each image and moment of these clever, touching, sensual, and candid poems. What I am especially impressed by is the narrative ease of both poets, the momentum of their compact, eminently readable verse, carrying us forward into the present while retaining the sense of the historical past. Both poets create a correspondence between old world myth and modern attitude. The classical antiquity, the romantic costumes, the rich, mysterious landscapes are rendered transparent and we see and feel what the poets experience. The ancient trappings take on very human faces, sometimes ironic and erotic, sometimes poignant, always perceptive and honest."What started out as a private trip of a lifetime for three people has been poetically memorialized into a public adventure of the spirit and senses."-Robert Karmo