Prayer for My Daughter

Praise for the Poetry of David St. JohnIt is not just gorgeous it is go-for-broke gorgeous. It is made out of sentences sweeping through and across his meticulous verse stanzas that could have been written for their velvet and intricate suavity by Henry James. But that doesn't quite describe them since they are also full almost past ripeness of a floating sometimes painful sometimes wistful intense dark and silvery eroticism that feels as if it comes out of some cross between late nineteeth-century symbolist lushness vague and specific at once and the kind of '60s and '70s European film that talked about eroticism with a wistfulness so intense that it seemed experience and the melancholy recollection of experience were the same thing. Mallarmé and Eric Rohmer perhaps. Or Rilke and Michelangelo Antonioni. -Robert Hass The Los Angeles Times Book Review