Here City: Poems

From the deceptively simple Relapse to the surrealist personal history of Field Notes, the thirty-seven poems of Rick Snyder’s collection, Here City, deserve and demand repeated readings. They are compelling, observant, and provocative. Focused on Southern California and the earliest years of the twenty-first century, the poet’s visions and their words, their personal and cultural specificity, succeed in creating a reliable description of the time, place, and person behind their creation. On that basis, they deserve the reader’s full attention and this reviewer’s full marks.

At the same time, it’s because of that focus that these poems largely fail to meet a crucial demand placed upon mature poets and poetry: longevity. There is little of the universal in time, place, or experience, of a consistent ability to share the visions and transform their words for a wider audience. That universal element is present at the start but lost in the distance long before the journey is finished. As a result, as with a good meal, be satisfied by Here City, but expect to be hungry again soon.