Selected Poems

Mary Ellen Miller was a poet and Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

In “The Lotus Eaters,” Solway writes:

We can see no reason to burn

like some charitable star

that delights in the manifold

wanderings on sea or land

of a man perpetually at odds

with the universe around him.

These flat lines and this tired idea are typical of many of the poems, but Solway is a real two-column poet: some strengths; some weaknesses. He is almost always weak when writing about the world as a mean old place. The opening poem, “Requiem for Charles Whitman,” contains such bothersome distortions as, “One day Charles to the dark tower came”; too many adjectives (a failing throughout this work); and this foolish ending:

Now wrapped in the earth he is laid to rest,

His bullet-holed body in her fabulous breast.

In Column I (weaknesses), I would include such greeting-card nonsense as the last lines of “Ornithology”:

And I’ve listened to the feathered words

of the harbinger of love,

Of all my allegorical birds

Beware the ravenous dove.

And the list goes on: the pointlessness of “It’s All in the Westerns”; the sentimental wailing at the hard, cold world of “Rock Light and Water”; the topic sentence openings of poems like “The Goalie”:

I always wanted to be a goalie

and of “The Idealist’s Confession”:

If this is love I feel

why should it feel like no love at all?

In Column I include the cuteness of the opening to “The Egyptian Airforce”:

The Egyptian airforce is less than the sum of its pilots.

Add the sermonizing in “Fable of the Child and the Donkey”; the ridiculousness of the theme of “In Defense of Marriage” (the neighbors titter while the about-to-be-divorced speaker hangs out diapers; it’s okay though because the angels are smiling in heaven).

Now for the good news. “Pastoral” is a controlled, evocative poem; “Trees” is effective; “The Goalie” has this wonderful image:

(Pucks whizzed by like I was hitchhiking)

“Plenitude” is tight, meaningful, fresh, free of whining — Solway is best when not writing about himself or the mean world or the disappointments of the great Christian promise. He is also best when not rhyming. Yet he knows how to rhyme, and “Requiem for Peggy” is an expert handling of both rhyme and meter. “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” is a nice little spin-off poem that shows Solway’s education.

But Column I is longer — surprisingly so, for this is a poet who has read other poets, who has a fairly wide range of subjects, who demonstrates some real skill with the image. Perhaps if he practiced reading some of these works aloud, he would hear the sing-songiness of his contrived rhyme endings like this one in “Sample Epitaphs for a Certain Poet”:

A downed or grounded angel, he

exalted God lamentably.