Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
That Said gathers poems from ten of Robert Schreur's privately printed volumes, along with a selection of new poems. Included are short lyrics, blank-verse sonnets, erotic odes, children's verse, and three-line tanka. Across these styles the poet attempts to discover a personal language answerable to a demand for pleasure and insight. Taken together, the poems reflect an effort to achieve in poetic form an ethic of impermanence. Success in that endeavor might look like the "disorder of truths" Wallace Stevens wrote of: "They are things chalked / On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see." That Said is an offering of such apprehended things.