Wall of Sound

In Wall of Sound, David Stephenson's sonnets, rhymed quatrains, and blank verse illuminate a rich variety of worlds and personalities. From a steel mill to a paint factory to a police impound lot, Stephenson's poetry of place explores unexpectedly fascinating locales. He persuasively imagines the lives within a snow globe, and he draws thoughtful parallels between a casino and a mine, a crop duster and a god. Stephenson engages the reader with a conversational tone and well-chosen rhymes; the clever eye-rhyme of "watch" and "match" makes clear the frustration of a man hoping to synchronize all his timepieces. And with convincing empathy, Stephenson writes in the voices of others-animate and inanimate-including a lab rat, a match, a spacecraft, and Sir Isaac Newton. "Toolmaker" exemplifies one of the book's most effective techniques, the juxtaposition of the mundane and the profound: this poem's persona suggests, with understated but scathing wisdom, that what marks us as human is not our use of tools, but "an inborn urge to sharpen blades."

Jean L. Kreiling



David Stephenson's Wall of Sound is rich and full, many-textured and multi-layered. Stephenson's detailed poems cover a wide range of subjects, with landscapes both urban (a freeway casino, a muffler shop, a Ramada Inn) and rural (the ditches and fields of his childhood, a rock quarry on his grandfather's farm). Stephenson also writes in the voices of others, both human (Spartacus, Merlin, a tomb-builder at Thebes) and non-human (a pet dog, a cavefish, a dairy cow), as well as the "in-between" monster of Frankenstein. The book contains more personal poems too, and the most moving ones include memories of his late father and brother. There are well-made sonnets here, rhyming quatrains and other forms, which give the book an overall music. But kudos to Stephenson for crafting his poems in a more relaxed formalism - iambic pentameter that's not metronomic, rhymes that often work quietly in the background. In these poems, meaning and substance are as important as form, making Wall of Sound an antidote for the indecipherable lines that inundate poetry today.

Elise Hempel