Selected Poems

Bob Lincoln is the director of acquisitions at the University of
Manitoba Libraries.

This is an enjoyable collection of short poems that were published
between 1967 and 1989. Some were revised, Leonard Gasparini notes, to
better express poetic truth and to satisfy his own desire to shape
language into a more exact edge and statement. Presented in approximate
chronological order, the poems show a movement from the rough, insistent
voice of a wandering youth to the more reflective discourse of an older
man who describes events that happen around him with regret, concern,
and delight.

The poems combine hard, unblinking details and intellectual restraint.
They are often, paradoxically, both understated and overstated.
Occasionally, Gasparini reverts to rhyme and fixed meter; the result is
poems that are clear, but without depth. Most poems are written in blank
verse and struggle with heavier themes of death, love, and displacement.
The animal poems are snapshots, the tropic poems are Badaekers that skip
along from country to country. The poems on Robinson Jeffers and Sister
Mary Sylvia have possibilities—the outlines of personal drama and
tragedy are hinted at—but they are not fully developed.

The overall effect of this collection is satisfying, perhaps because
the poems themselves are fluid and precise where they have to be. There
is no attempt to categorize and list, as new poets regularly do. Nor
does Gasparini cram his poems with the first person (“I’ve lived
days ...”; “Still I look for something ...”) as if the poem were
an audiotape to be heard while driving. Gasparini has worked and thought
through these lines for many years; in retrospect, he can be pleased
with the results.