River of Heaven
In its concerns and techniques, Hongo's second bookthe 1987 Lamont Poetry Selectionsuggests comparisons to Wordsworth and Whitman. Combining the former's preoccupation with personal remembrance and the latter's penchant for syntactic repetition and catalogs, Hongo attempts to dazzle the reader with megadoses of imagery both lush ("the harpstring shade of tree ferns") and frank ("a patch of wild land full of blown garbage"). Sometimes he flirts with excess ("spider lilies and ginger flowers like paper cranes/ furling in the tongues of overgrowth"), but the character studies and first-person narratives that speak of life in nonwhite America attain an authority unobscured by imagistic mannerisms.Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.