Regina Murray Brault is a versatile, mature poet with a special talent for transforming familiar situations into artful reflections on the human
experience --- clarifications of life, in the words of Robert Frost.
“Eggs” has a similar progress, enhanced by graceful similes --- “veins spread up the back of her hand like a tree of life”, “the introspection.
sun slides down the backside of the hill like a bleeding yolk” --- and ending again by beckoning the reader toward
introspection.
“Every Living Thing” and “At Either End of the Web” strike one as skillful evolutions of the poet’s voice, mingling in a more sophisticated
manner playful metaphor with evocative images from the commonplace outer world and the reader’s ambiguous inner world.
“If This House Were a Woman” is a bold and thoroughly admirable departure from the other pieces in this group, dismissing all punctuation
except the dash, and adeptly sustaining an edgily figurative tone --- resisting, one gratefully remarks, the inclination, now popular in some
quarters, to indulge in a misconceived surrealism.
Altogether, one feels that these poems are a distinctly rewarding encounter. Especially the last lines of “Eggs” and “Every Living Thing.”
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Dr. Oliver Rice grew up in small towns near Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri. He became an active amateur musician and a U. S. Navy pilot
prior to earning a Doctorate in modern American literature and teaching at several universities. Dr. Rice was subsequently employed as a
book editor, a developer of learning programs, and a team leader on linguistic projects in Africa and Southeast Asia, under contract with the
Ford Foundation, the Peace Corps and the U. S. Army. As a leisure undertaking while working in Singapore, he collected, edited, and co-
translated a bilingual volume of modern Malay verse, the first introduction of Malay poets to an English speaking audience, published by the
Oxford University Press.
Having retired to write poetry in Naples, Florida, Dr. Rice has won the Theodore Roethke Prize and twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
His poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies in the United States , as well as in Canada , England , Austria , Turkey ,
and India.
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