Reviews
Review by: Alina Stefanescu, author of DOR and RIBALD - May 24, 2023
"If Rainer Maria Rilke shared a notebook with Frank Stanford, something like Clifford Brooks's lyric would climb to the surface. Changing pace from soft whirls to sharp, jagged lines and then sinews, the poems travel through Southern life, music, love, memory, despair, hope. This whirling motion carved from places and worn spaces is as sensitive as it is raw. The back porch has enough space for Bacchus and Bach; the heart has enough space elegy and rapture; 'the sky is a nightgown'--and this book is its stunning horizon."
Review by: Jeffrey Skinner, author of 6.5 PRACTICES OF MODERATELY SUCCESSFUL POETS - May 24, 2023
"Clifford Brooks is a poet who just can't help it: poems fly out of him like weightless jewels, like the hummingbirds he writes of so cannily. The poetry in OLD GODS is ebullient, alive, and blessedly uncategorizable. It is casually populated by totems of the rural South that also happen to be real, and that Brooks knows intimately. OLD GODS says essential things in new ways, while remaining tied to individual human vision, in a voice confident and shy, audacious, and tender. It is a joy to read."
Review by: Stuart Dischell, award-winning author of GOOD HOPE ROAD - May 24, 2023
"Clifford Brooks is a poet of awe, of what the Greeks termed agape--to be open-mouthed with wonder. These observant, powerfully imaged poems are also open-hearted and embracing of the physical and familial realms, the wild and the domestic, and the possibilities for metaphysical and spiritual transformation. Gentle and intense, there is a wisely modest quality that the last line of the very first poem invokes for me so well: 'I do not know how words capture / trees.' Yet capture he does in these valuable poems included in his newest book, OLD GODS."
Review by: Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate and author of SCAR AND FLOWER - May 23, 2023
"This is poetry full of music and light about God, autism, addiction, and love. Brooks is an alchemist and a lyricist, an agile wordsmith with tenderness and fire. OLD GODS holds as much wonder as there is command: sound, rhythm, invention. Piercing and free. Revelation songs. What a voice."