Böcker av Ricardo Quinones

Following his break-through first volume of poems, Through the Years (2010), and its successor, Roberta and Other Poems (2011), Ricardo Quinones has upped the ante with a generous selection from those earlier volumes and additions from a ready supply of new poems presented here. A Sorting of the Ways: New and Selected Poems contains such poems as "The Grafting Tree," a mythical marriage between a giant oak and a chair; "Ten and More," the record of a ten-year-old's deflating experience of the Korean War after the jubilation of 1945 and the end of WWII; "To Pick a Penny," another far-reaching poem about the magic qualities of a penny; and "Spoiler Speech," the fragile hold of civilized consciousness against the uprising of a primitive rage. The volume also announces the demise of the popular "Wallet Poems," mainly by virtue of their own superabundance and their replacement by a new kind of verse, "Bloc Notes." In the poem "A New Beginning," Quinones takes the gamble of expressing his own philosophical and moral desideratum as to the nature of art and society, thus enacting his belief that at sometime a writer-poet must come to grips with those things he thinks essential if a society is to be reborn.

Ricardo Quinones has followed his first volume of poems, Through the Years (2010), with a second, dedicated in large part to his wife, Roberta. Unlike other such volumes of personal interest, these poems begin with specific qualities that are then raised to the general. The poem 'Odalisque' transfigures women, even in their sexual composure, into the sources of culture and civilization. Several of the poems are humorous, such as the one describing the couple's futile attempts to set aside Tuesday as a day of abstinence. All of the poems in Roberta are rich in historical allusions. The second part of the volume contains a philosophical poem, 'Rocks and Their Fellow Travelers,' which begins with the premise that nowhere in the Bible does it say that God created rocks and then proceeds to compare the nature of these anti-gods with Satan, Esau, Sisyphus, Iago, and Goneril (from King Lear). The volume adds to the very popular 'Wallet Poems' from Through the Years and then finishes with 'Profanities,' a poem that the late poet and critic Aino Passonen of Santa Monica declared made Quinones "a major American poet."

Written over the last ten years, Ricardo Quinones' debut book of poems, Through the Years, is a mixture of regular and irregular forms, with subject matter ranging from Kansas to Southern California. The sometimes jaunty and sometimes meditative poems seek to use common words in an uncommon way, mixing humor with seriousness.But many poems are philosophical, or deeply psychological, such as "Why Do Grown Men Weep?" and "The American Writer," while others border on the religious: "Desert Bloom" and "Oil and Water." The volume contains new sections called "Wallet Poems"--poems dealing with day-to-day subjects that are meant to be carried with you.Mr. Quinones' poems skillfully vary in their reflectiveness, ultimately making the collection practically impossible to summarize.