The Tao of Twang (Reviews)

Review from Amazon:

Not long ago I raved about Tim Hunt’s poetry book Fault Lines. Hunt connected his cool northern California background with his current southern Illinois prairie state of mind.

His new collection, The Tao of Twang, presents an oxymoronic question: how does the essence of Chinese wisdom infuse country music? Hunt answers this question in a sequence of funny, satiric poems featuring a character, T. Texas Twiddle, Hunt’s version of Berryman’s Henry in The Dream Songs.

My favorite poems are more straightforward. “Still Life with Ash Tray and Beer Can” sets forth an esthetic that could derive from the Ash Can School of Painting. “Depending: Three Side Yard Scenes on a Borrowed Image” lends Williams’s canonical lines a frisson of the noir:

the rusted
barrow

darkened
red from

the rain, the
feathers slick

in her hand,
the bright

pulse spattering
the weeds.