Buff Whitman-Bradley is a poet of life's little moments, of nature, and in earlier volumes, of political poems that rage with compassion. One of his previous collections,
At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality,
is a book of swan songs, but songs from a swan that isn't much interested in pathos, whining, or tragedy. This swan shrugs its extravagant wings at mortality and sings its songs with grace, wit, economy, a perfect ear, and understated profundity. In this new volume, the poet continues making us laugh and sigh, and sometimes gasp in astonishment, with his melancholy, ecstatic, imaginative, philosophical, and utterly charming poems about life, age (old and young), nature, the theological debates of ants, the nectar-besotted revelries of bees, whimsically imagined after-lives, and the poet's own glee at his little granddaughter's assessment of him: "He's a good guy/but he's really slow."
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Phineas Stolyavitch