These quiet, inwardly-penetrating poems relate an autobiography and an homage tot he powers of early modernism. What the poet finds in his exploration of Gaudier-Brzeska's visual primitivism or Ezra Pound's classical retrieval is a lyric interior, private as it is also record of a public culture. Intimate disclosure comes through the tightly wound syllables and rhythms of the poem. Snell has absorbed the lessons of his life and the words that shape it, making these poems from the evident purpose and intent behind whatever urge it is, simply, to write or make song. His success or failure, by his own terms of inward measure, is a matter of small concern for us. We are let briefly into the quiet and awkward earnestness of his thoughts and feelings. How he feels about the matter of his experience and the Art shaping it reveals the uncertainty of one who is lost. The humble lack of confidence, bold perseverances and forthright statements of intent give us the progressive discoveries of a man planted in his nature. In that I am content to linger in the varied topoi of these poems.

--Dale Smith