Apostrophes VI

"Where much of contemporary formally innovative poetry unstructures conventional syntax, these poems seek an ancient, traditional, and highly rhetorical syntax in lengthy compound-complex sentences full of twists and turns of focus and desire..Where much of contemporary formally innovative poetry unstructures conventional syntax, these poems seek an ancient, traditional, and highly rhetorical syntax in lengthy compound-complex sentences full of twists and turns of focus and desire." Douglas Barbour, Canadian Book Review Annual, 2005.
"I reviewed E.D. Blodgett's An Arc of Koans last year, and have decided that it must speak well of Blodgett's versatility that the poems included in open the grass (both are part of his apostrophes series), are so different in manner. Picture broad, page-wide paragraphs (in a square-format book) threaded with long, sinewy, wistful sentences. The former volume was made up of diminutive riddle poems, evoking impressions more in what they do not say than in what they make explicit. These poems work just as interestingly from the other direction, from the side of prolix extension and operatic accumulation. The thematic furniture is outsize - stars, sky, trees, moon, sea, silence, and of course fields and fields of grass - but they are handled so lightly and dreamily that the poems seem like so many snowglobes with their two or three primary elements falling in a soft flurry of words." Jeffery Donaldson, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol 75, No.1, Winter 2006