What Others Are Saying About Shocking the Dark

In an impressive variety of verse forms—from sonnet to senryu— Robert Lowes employs craft as an engine that drives a restless and penetrative sensibility as it considers human activity and its objects.  What is well-finished here in metric and metaphor is likely to be unsatisfied with the mere finish of surfaces in his poetic occasions. For example, he casts a mindful eye on paintings in two history-haunted ekphrastic sequences.  One exposes the grim ironies that attend a portrait of Robert E. Lee entitled "The Christian General.”  The other conjures with the artistic vision of Paul Klee, joining the poet’s imagination to the painter’s to read in the canvases the beginnings of a brutal era.  Lowes looks at ceremonies, secular and religious—a class reunion, communion, a road trip with talk-radio accompaniment--to go beyond the offered meanings for what more things can mean, can be revealed to have meant, can be made to mean. Above all, he offers us a poetry of value because it values, examines, assesses; it is a poetry of song and conscience.  

 —Jason Sommer, author of Portulans and Shmuel’s Bridge

This book might have been titled after one of its poems, “Divine Regret,” for registering the world’s sublime beauty, mixed as it is with the seemingly unnecessary pain and error built into it. These poems, beating with a liturgical rhythm of thought, illuminate, delay, perhaps even push back the dark, be it nightfall, injustice, or death. Lowes is aware of gaps. Gaps between doubter and tradition, between art and its context, between reader and writer, created and creator. And so this collection crackles with irony—but also with acts of creation, acknowledgment, acceptance, and gratitude.

—Chuck Sweetman, author of Enterprise, Inc.

Robert Lowes’s Shocking the Dark begins with mystics and fly balls: “those sprints / to the right place / in the first place.” Later, he holds up another “catch,” praising “the jewel-like greens and blues/of shingled scales . . . conquests, not gifts.” Throughout, we witness possession and persecution, poems that shock even the dark. Lowes analyzes chaos through varied form—pantoums, sonnets, free verse, ghazals, couplets, haiku, a series on Paul Klee, whose late paintings “prophesied . . . the Holocaust.” But do not despair: there’s enough hope, faith, and humor to light the way. 

—Marjorie Maddox, author of  Begin with a Question and How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled?

In Shocking the Dark, Robert Lowes delves into numerous forms, including contemporary haiku, with curious confidence. He mingles Paul Klee and Robert E. Lee amid epitaphs of wit and humility. Office interiors, funeral homes, coffee cups, roadside billboards, class reunions, swimsuits, and prayers “play me into a trance,” with the book becoming like his experience of Scheherazade, in the poem Prelude, which concludes as an experience of “a breathing life, a beating heart”. Lowes has given us a book of poems that are very much alive, and, in doing so, reminds us that poetry is, too.

—Ben Gaa, author of One Note Moon, One Breath, and host of Haiku Talk on YouTube

What Others Are Saying About An Honest Hunger

In poems that range from elegiac to exuberant, Robert Lowes’s An Honest Hunger is a joyful dance with everyday life. It is a book full of faith and doubt, anger and suffering, but one still laugh-out-loud funny. Lowes’s hunger for God, for meaning in life, makes this book the one to read now, when this hunger is more universal and pressing than ever.

--Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of America that island off the coast of France, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 

If more poets wrote like Robert Lowes, more people would read poetry.  In An Honest Hunger, his debut collection, Lowes never holds the reader at a distance. Here, the poet speaks with straightforward intelligence and acumen—and a pitch-perfect natural friendliness—without a scintilla of sentimentality. And his imagery is sublime.  From “Takeoff”:  “We’re sorted by row and seat,/a neat tray of human chocolates,/but an indifferent audience/for the drone of the flight attendant’s/apocalyptic tips, played on tape/while she, an officious pantomime,/distills them into iconography….” An Honest Hunger appeals to humanity’s better self and reminds us that we are united not so much by our strengths as by our woundedness. 

--Robert Nazarene, author of Empire de la Mort, editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Poetry 

An Honest Hunger is a book of great heart. My favorite pieces are formal, like the stunning sestina about recovery from surgery. Pick it up. It’s a great and soothing read.

--Jane Ellen Ibur, author of The Little Mrs./Misses, poet laureate of St. Louis

Robert Lowes addresses with wit and compassion topics we recognize: the body’s betrayals, unfulfilled desires, nostalgia, loss. Lowes’s love of words is apparent in his masterful sound work and the equal skill with which he depicts the delicate beauty of a butterfly or slams home a devastating judgment on our human failings. A wide-ranging cast of characters wanders through these poems: a woman who keeps chickens, a Neanderthal buying an ax, a man with a fresh haircut, God. An Honest Hunger opens to us a world that is humorous and deeply serious, filled with signs and wonders, mischief and memories, unanswerable questions and unexpected redemptions—our world, the whole, sweet “slapstick ballet.”  

 --Marjorie Stelmach, author of Falter