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Title: Rain: ideational diversity and poetic self-awareness
Review: In his volume Rain, Henry Carlile covers a wide swath of ideational ground, such as the trajectories of loss qua death and divorce, the ideological nuances of camouflage and "why poets write so much about death and... not jut go fishing instead" with unfailing attention the his craft. His poems exhibit an impressive understanding of the conventions of poetry, and in certain cases they actually gain momentum through a reversal of said conventions, such as in "Desire" where Carlile turns the usual fire/desire trope on its head, then all but looks up and laughs: "In one of the meditation" writes Carlile "you have to imagine / the object of your desire as her face blisters / and falls apart... You meditate on that, you think of fire. / Fire is a bad rhyme and a good remedy for desire." A similar, though usually less blatant, poetic self-awareness pervades much of the volume. I highly recommend it.
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