E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Homeless Chronicles from Abraham to Burning Man reviewed by Nick Houghton by Gerard Sarnat Gerard Sarnat, now in his seventh decade, has brought the precision learnt during his medical career, combined it with the compassion acquired while running staffed clinics for those on the margins of society, to produce a collection of great power. By fusing his own life experiences with those of the outsiders described in the poems, Sarnat has achieved the goal of every poet, that of making the personal universal. In the opening section Sons Rise in the West , the two poems First Times and Whimperbang: Yad Vasheem Revisited , initially seem aesthetically worlds apart. However, the two poems are linked by the juxtaposition of the joyfully erotic in First Times, when the poet’s first sexual encounter is described, basement rendezvous dark and dank, huddled near the furnace, boil boil, trouble trouble trouble, and the bleak evocation of industrialised slaughter in, Whi...