The Marble Shoot

By Dave Johnson

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 096497651X
• ISBN13: 9780964976511
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Hummingbird Press
• Length: 65 Pages

Customer Reviews

"Marble Shoots" shoots straight for the soul

In this starkly beautiful and powerful collection of poems, Johnson takes inspiration from a youth presumably spent climbing trees and walking the woods of Charlotte, N.C. His opening poems, "Coming Home after taking Grandma to the Doctor" and "Baking on Saturday Morning with my Mother" transcend the rural quietude suggested by their titles, taking the reader into the darker and more perilous possibilities inherent in childhood. In the former, he recalls how as a third grader he learned that he lived in the "state like a diamond...diamondback rattlesnake;" in the latter, he is entrusted with a solemn duty while baking with his mother--"She told me, 'you are the watchman. She washed up and went on and I stayed, my glued hands balled up, waiting for the buzzer to go off." Johnson has a gift for turning the most ordinary task or undertaking into a special occasion. Whether he is describing a prisoner baseball game or remembering days spent with his childhood friend Miss Allie or of spending a holiday apart from his parents, he seems to know exactly how to make the reader share in the experience. The entire collection is a gift to readers and poetry lovers everywhere.