Drifting to "Hello"

The poems in this collection of Fred Gerhard's work range considerably: from Victorian rooms to the Pennsylvania and New England landscapes he knows intimately; from the psychology of inner experience to the dance of interpersonal relationships; from the noise of the trains that run through all of our lives (and occasionally crash into walls) to the quiet of the "dark grape taste of twilight." Likewise, Gerhard's diverse poetic techniques run the gamut from lucid and conversational free verse to skillful and musical rhyme. Throughout, he crafts memorable lines and indelible images, giving (as he puts it in his tribute to Edgar Allan Poe) "consonant to forlorn sound"-and to the sound of joy.