“…consistently interesting—often luminous poetry—”
As an entity,We Did Not Fear the Father might be summed up as a collection whose concern is limits: the limits of history, of form, of the collective and thepersonal. Read in chronological order, the poems become increasingly longer, denser, and more assertive as time bears down on the poet, as the liminal spaces of a lifetime shift and change. If the purpose of a ‘selected’ work is meant to give a sense of the best of a poet’s career up through present day, We Did NotFear the Father achieves its goal—and then some. This collection gives one the sense of a life lived in poetry.
-Kay Cosgrove
He is, clearly, a virtuoso of craft, movingeffortlessly from sonnets, to prose poems, to villanelles, tosestinas, elegies andhaiku, to name a few.
-Kay Cosgrove
“This is the clock of boundaries,” the opening poem in the book announces,“marking its descent as itsfinal seconds / pass into history and without pause /we harm what it tells us to harm” (“The Town Clock Burning”). The poems selected from this first book inquire about history in the broadest sense, history as our collective inheritance. After all, “we are children of circumstance, slaveships and reckless stars” (“Race War”)
-Kay Cosgrove
In “New Poems” Fort drops the barrier between speaker and poet altogether, writing about his two daughters and the deaths of his wife Wendy and his brother Kenny. These poems are intimate,specific and wildly beautiful. It is no coincidence they are at the very center of the book, the heart of the collection.
-Kay Cosgrove
No review an adequately praise the poetic and moral victory of this collection…the refusal to assume easy answers or to merely express hate, and the difficult, earned humility of “Race War” are testaments to Fort’s power’s as a poet…it is a speech-act of authenticity and integrity…
I’m also struck here by how the poem’s allusion and borrowing form Tennyson work so naturally, the sonority of Fort’s language throughout this poem, and elsewhere in the collection is worthy of comparison to Tennyson.
-Ken Shedd, The Mid-American Review
The refusal to assume easy answers or to merely express hate,and the difficult, earned humility of the poem are testaments to Fort's powers as a poet…
-Ken Shedd
I'm also struck here by how the poem's allusion and borrowing from Tennyson work so naturally; the sonority of Fort's language throughout this poem, and elsewhere in the collection, is worthy of comparison with Tennyson.
-Ken Shedd
“Charles Fort has found an utterly precise and moving idiom for things large and small, ones that would – before Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz — have seemed beyond expression.
He is matchless.”
“In deconstructing the great patchwork quilt that is American culture, Fort undermines any notion of the Other while understanding all too well the reality of it. His poems are jazzy riffs through Fourth ofJuly bombast, Native American lore,Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the detritus of a post-war materialism.”