As Ronald Johnson wrote, William Benton’s witty and inventive Birds single-handedly resurrected the Concrete Poetry movement. Pigeons, lovebirds, and Flaubert’s parrot appear here as “quirky and comical birds far more bird-like than most portraits rendered by heavier hands” (Peter Matthiessen).
“He tells us something about the paradoxes of love at the same time that he tells us about… art.”—Lilly Wei “High style without grandiloquence.”―John Godfrey “Love, carnal and fated, fills these pages. You can have it but as if in a proverb of the East, you cannot keep it except in brilliant memory. Beautiful, intense, and utterly absorbing.” —James Salter “Very persuasive, disturbing, and written with lovely sentences and small, understated, elegant moments.” —Ann Beattie “William Benton is primarily a poet, and the book [Eye Contact] gradually gains its unique success from the real experience of his lifetime, the coups and crises of marriage and family, its ring of truth resounding from a persisting and expansive source of human authenticity.”―Vyt Bakaitis
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