Times review of "The God of This World to His Prophet"
Bill Coyle and his wife and their puppy are good friends of mine, so it puts a big smile on my face—let alone Bill’s—to see this brief but positive New York Times review of Bill’s debut book of poems:
THE GOD OF THIS WORLD TO HIS PROPHET: Poems. By Bill Coyle. (Ivan R. Dee, $22.50.) Reading “Aubade,” the tiny poem that concludes Coyle’s debut collection, is like witnessing a hole-in-one. It’s a single, flawless stroke: “On a dead street / in a high wall / a wooden gate / I don’t recall / ever seeing open / is today / and I who happen / to pass this way / in passing glimpse / a garden lit / by dark lamps / at the heart of it.” That final period (the cup, so to speak, into which the poem disappears) is the only punctuation. Coyle makes commas unnecessary by breaking the sentence so skillfully across dimeter lines. He also makes those clever alternating full- and off-rhymes seem perfectly inevitable. What ices it, though, is the bracing strangeness of that last image: “lit / by dark lamps.” One suspects that even Coyle, for all his formal control, didn’t see that one coming. If some of the poems that precede “Aubade” seem, by contrast, a little too much under his control, offering the mastery without the mystery, well, there’s a lot to be said for mastery.
You can buy The God of This World to His Prophet: Poems
Bill Coyle’s website is www.billcoyle.com.
