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Human Cathedrals
Poems by John Sweet
Ravenna Press


"Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?"
-Pablo Picasso


Some will argue that John Sweet's new collection of poetry, Human Cathedrals, exists because we, today, fight to transcend our own humanity, because we fight to escape the empirical world—and it was only a matter of time before someone like John Sweet would come around to ground the imagination. Certain people will call themselves profound thinkers and take it upon themselves to explain what is important is the author's relationship with his family. These critics and readers will have successfully compacted the author's disturbingly honest voice. Sweet's poetry is nothing if not an attempt to uncover the self's self, before immersing it in its own frail humanity.

Human Cathedrals is a collection of poems—and I say experiences—which embrace the very nothingness of selfhood. Sweet reveals through startling experiential accounts an all too familiar struggle to maintain personal faith amongst the conflation of disparate, and often painful, events that surround human reality.

The poem the human cathedral in darkness stands out for the tension it creates between the poet’s own life and the hardships that lie outside his locus of control. Take this example from the text:

and what exactly
is my responsibility to
all of the battered women in the
western world?

how many lives am i expected to save
and who on the other side
of this thin sheet of paper has
the balls to give me an answer?

what matters is that
the mortgage is due

is that my son
has an ear infection and
that his lunch needs to be packed

and wars don’t alter this
or the suicide bombings of
religious zealots

John Sweet asks the reader, and perhaps himself, how can we expect to resolve anything of consequence in the world, when our personal lives require, or rather garner, so much attention. Sweet uses a wide array of unsettling disturbances and shrewd observations to contrast with his personal situation. And he often makes no distinction between a fourteen year-old girl with a gun to her head, and the prediction of snow; these elements are nothing but mere atmospheric details, which exist outside the author’s sphere of being.

One will find starkness in Sweet’s words, which in less capable hands might come off as tonal flatness, but the imagistic vigor really saps the energy from the reader. Human Cathedral's success is the embodiment of Sweet’s own personal philosophy: “you need hope, even knowing that it will fail you.” The poetry is largely unafraid, and makes clear that the Earth has nothing to do with us, and only personal experience matters.


***


To order Human Cathedrals, please visit:


Or order through Amazon.com
ravennapress

***

reviewed by ryan (Lo Qi)

[[我还没有昵称]]

Human Cathedrals
Poems by John Sweet
Ravenna Press


"Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?"
-Pablo Picasso


Some will argue that John Sweet's new collection of poetry, Human Cathedrals, exists because we, today, fight to transcend our own humanity, because we fight to escape the empirical world—and it was only a matter of time before someone like John Sweet would come around to ground the imagination. Certain people will call themselves profound thinkers and take it upon themselves to explain what is important is the author's relationship with his family. These critics and readers will have successfully compacted the author's disturbingly honest voice. Sweet's poetry is nothing if not an attempt to uncover the self's self, before immersing it in its own frail humanity.

Human Cathedrals is a collection of poems—and I say experiences—which embrace the very nothingness of selfhood. Sweet reveals through startling experiential accounts an all too familiar struggle to maintain personal faith amongst the conflation of disparate, and often painful, events that surround human reality.

The poem the human cathedral in darkness stands out for the tension it creates between the poet’s own life and the hardships that lie outside his locus of control. Take this example from the text:

and what exactly
is my responsibility to
all of the battered women in the
western world?

how many lives am i expected to save
and who on the other side
of this thin sheet of paper has
the balls to give me an answer?

what matters is that
the mortgage is due

is that my son
has an ear infection and
that his lunch needs to be packed

and wars don’t alter this
or the suicide bombings of
religious zealots

John Sweet asks the reader, and perhaps himself, how can we expect to resolve anything of consequence in the world, when our personal lives require, or rather garner, so much attention. Sweet uses a wide array of unsettling disturbances and shrewd observations to contrast with his personal situation. And he often makes no distinction between a fourteen year-old girl with a gun to her head, and the prediction of snow; these elements are nothing but mere atmospheric details, which exist outside the author’s sphere of being.

One will find starkness in Sweet’s words, which in less capable hands might come off as tonal flatness, but the imagistic vigor really saps the energy from the reader. Human Cathedral's success is the embodiment of Sweet’s own personal philosophy: “you need hope, even knowing that it will fail you.” The poetry is largely unafraid, and makes clear that the Earth has nothing to do with us, and only personal experience matters.


***


To order Human Cathedrals, please visit:


Or order through Amazon.com
ravennapress

***

reviewed by ryan (Lo Qi)