Salute

A work that shifts from high to low, philosophical, to ethical, to comic, in Bolton’s well known, and highly praised, flexible style. A new collection from a prolific poet.

Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping thru the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem’s jib, there the poise & rancour of another. For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some moment of last judgement & wave at the gate keeper, a tall and bearded dude, surely a hipster–avant la lettre but also after it–outside of time in fact, where final judgements are, and truth and poetry. You wave it at him. It’s a talisman, dude, you say. ‘An earnest,’ says the figure, ‘of your capacity for cool and rigour?’ He nods and you smile. You both smile–and he waves you in.