Deep Gossip: New and Selected Poems

The natural world, with a focus on birds, in particular, is the heart of much of the work in Sidney Wade’s latest poetry collection Deep Gossip. While the subject matter is universal and the imagery at times quite beautiful, the repetitive nature of the rhyme scheme in many of the poems keeps this collection from being fully successful.

In the first poems in the collection, the new work, lines are short, images sparse, and the effect is limited. Many of these poems feel dashed off, unpolished, and uncentered. “Nature Poets,” for instance, could be a glorified diary entry. However, the star of the most recent work is “Seeing the Ophthalmologist,” a poem so perfect the final lines develop the visceral feeling of having one’s eyes puffed at the eye doctor. The latter work of the selected section contains rhyme that distracts from a greater idea rather than adding to it, but the finest poem in the book, “Beatrice Rising,” makes wading through the lesser poems worth it.

For those who haven’t read Wade’s work before, the book does have merit. It is an excellent primer on a writer who has an uncanny ability to render nature so tangibly that you can nearly hear the birdsong and smell the bougainvillea in her poems.