Nomadic Trajectory

Bob Lincoln is Head of the Acquisitions Department at the University of
Manitoba Libraries.

The collections in Guernica Edition’s Essential Poets series have been
intimate, challenging, and varied in both style and scope. Nomadic
Trajectory proves to be an exception. Verdicchio intends to explore a
world of absence and displacement, as if he were an omniscient observer,
and the reader a person in need of instruction and direction. The
intrepid traveler, however, quickly gets lost along the way. These poems
are fragmentary, disjointed, and unfocused. The collection is written in
free verse and prose parables; there seems to be no direction intended.
Verdicchio is writing to a critical stance. Unfortunately, these poems
do not intrigue or communicate well enough as a result. They do fit into
an intellectual print, but the poems do not have the energy to rise from
the surface.

The images are often ordinary and verbose, piled one after the other
like random quotes: for example, “Carnal suspension / in numerological
exactitude / when the structure breaks / the rescue / motion into
coherence” (from “The Arsonist”). There is the sense here that
Verdicchio has been deliberate in his structure and direction, but the
poems themselves are lost in the service of abstractions.