Harvest, the new Selected Poems by Farmington resident John Rosenwald, covers lots of ground, from what the author calls “heavy light verse” to carefully crafted free verse to an occasional sonnet. His topics range from Richard Nixon’s inauguration to love poems based on Plato’s philosophy to the complex portrait of a Chinese family a year after the Tiananmen incident of 1989. Poems as short as four lines mix with longer experimental pieces sketching street performers in old Montreal and the interaction of three female figures in a Shanghai Temple. As might be expected in a selection including poems from nearly sixty years, a period that has witnessed substantial changes in American concepts of poetry, the variety is substantial, but the skill level remains consistent. In Rosenwald’s volume, every reader should find work that provokes fresh emotions and rich thoughts.
