Description—

A Man, Ostensibly, Bart Baxter’s fifth volume of poetry, consists of sonnets, as well as two villanelles and a sestina. Baxter's are written in a casual voice, which offsets and enhances the consistent rhyme and meter of the sonnet form. The speaker in these poems questions the reasoning powers of the young, wonders about the meaning of family and the value of one’s own identity. These exceptional poems recognize the mind of a man who reaches beyond self through the mundane act of living, knowing there may be no answers.

Comments—

“This is formal poetry made to feel as informal as late night conversation.…”

—Belle Randall
Drop Dead Beautiful
Wood Works Press

"The self-portrait that shines through Bart Baxter’s new book is a study in contradictions. Deftly realized amid their formal constraints, these sonnets sneak up on us while the workaday mind is busy turning over the elegant puzzle we've been handed, and as true feelings will, modestly wait to be noticed, then embraced. The book adds up to a disarmingly open gesture, a full sketch of a man amid troubled times, winsome and loving and alive."

—Paul Hunter
Clown Car
editor/publisher of Wood Works Press

A feast of sonnets, spiced with a pair of villanelles and a sestina. Whether the tone is respectful seriousness or dry, ironic wit, these are poems to satisfy one’s appetite for sentences that move gracefully within their shapes. Relish them!

—Joseph Green
The End of Forgiveness
Floating Bridge Press

Reading Sonnets to Each Other

It’s just as well that nobody was here
to listen. What could we have possibly
been thinking, you and I? Imagine we’re
the only ones around us now, and we
could almost come together with our two
disheveled hearts. It’s quiet. We’re alone.
I want to give my audience to you
while all the candles burn down, one by one,
like sleepy stars. If Orpheus could read
when he had nothing else going for him
except Eurydice and all that she’d
been through, then maybe even in this dim
light we’ll admit to this: we have a knack
for holding forth and never looking back.

—Bart Baxter