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Book Details
Reviews for A House of Bottles
by Betsy Sholl, Poet Laureate of Maine
In A HOUSE OF BOTTLES, Robin Merrill writes with verve and wit. Whether she is taking us on a hospital ship to Africa or just next door, the journey is always into the depths of the human heart. Her faith is big enough to be both funny and frank, to grieve the world's terrible wounds and celebrate our enduring grit. These poems call us to compassion. Like prophecies written in lipstick across a mirror, we can't help but see, and can't possibly refuse Merrill's compelling vision.
by Gray Jacobik, author of BRAVE DISGUISES and THE DOUBLE TASK
Funny, harrowing, sad, animate: the poems gathered in Robin Merrill's A HOUSE OF BOTTLES are artful although unadorned, edgy and troubling (the way American life is edgy and troubling). and they are unshakeable--as if a rose with a canker had unfolded and spent its blooms before you. Merrill's vision isn't beautiful: it's just overwhelmingly real. These are "dare you" poems: they dare you to be vulnerable and to see. If you take the dare, you may not be glad, but you will be enriched.
Sample from A House of Bottles
The Bottle House - Kaleva, Michigan
He laid the pop bottles on their sides, bottoms out,
crafting different tints to spell Happy Home
in four foot letters spanning the wall.
All the way from Finland to run a bottle factory
and to build a house of bottles.
Now it stands, ageless, a museum
open summer Saturdays, noon to four.
For what one man spent his life
another collects donations at the door.
The only attraction in a town that boasts of quiet.
Using a secret formula for his own special mortar,
he stacked sixty thousand bottles, one by one
in perfect symmetry, corners precisely ninety degrees.
Thirty years, bent against the lake effect snow,
fingers deft inside deerskin, chaps stiff with grout.
When it was finished, John J. Mackinen stepped back
lit a smoke and said I built that.
His family was ready, their things were packed
but he died that night, without waking,
proud, satisfied and dreaming of making.
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