In Other Days by Roger Craik Reviewed in UP

Haiku and Winnie-the-Pooh
Review by Mack Hassler

My friend and colleague, Roger Craik, has a very nice poem on A.A. Milne in the new collection of his poems In Other Days but this review must focus eventually on Splake and the evolving literature of the UP. Craik is not a Yooper. Splake clearly is, however, as most readers will know. This hardcover volume of his work published by Shoe Music Press is dated a year ago so the slow and elaborate start to my review as well as its presumption to cover general topics of literature may be justified in its omnibus length by this lapse of time. In any case, I will get to Splake, as I have in the past in these reviews. But I begin with what I see as the larger view of poetry and with what I see as the “specialness” and necessity of being a poet for writers like Splake and Craik, who may never be nor are yet major literary figures. Like all of us, I am a fan of the major figures. I heard T.S. Eliot read once at the Hebrew Y on the eastside of Manhattan. I stood next to W.H. Auden at the intermission of a medieval play staged at Union Theological of Columbia University. I watched Ginsberg and Gary Snyder work the rooms full of students at Kent State University. But mostly I have admired and worked with many less “branded and famous” writers who seem willing to sacrifice nearly everything else in order to cast themselves as poets, who have a strong and inspirational sense of lineage and generation. So let me begin with the “begats” and, then, end with Splake as a Yooper. [READ MORE]

Read the whole review here

Buy In Other Days by Roger Craik here

“Reproduced from U.P. Book Review with permission”