Barn Owl Review in Brief: Matt Hart's Light-Headed

Friend of BOR and poetry Senior Hardcore Analyst Matt Hart has a book called Light-Headed. Coincidentally, I ordered this book and received it just days before the book made the list for Coldfront's Top 30 Poetry Books of 2011. The book is composed of mega-sonnets (with goodness between). The kind that can run ultra-marathons while memorizing all the most explosive words in the dictionary.

One of my favorite aspects of this book is how well Hart builds from the accumulation of recurring images. As he masterfully cycles back through images and phrases, each recurrence feels like it's new again, like I didn't just hear the word/phrase a few pages ago, but rather that I have known that phrase on my own for quite some time and am now seeing it new in a poem. It's that thing that poetry does, giving you something you think you know but never really knew, except that Hart makes that experience happen right here and now instead of it being a transference that comes from outside the context of the book. Delicious salad of (mis)understanding.