White Light- The Lost Vision of Montana

by Tom Eagle. 203 pages. Published by Anabasis, Oysterville, WA. 98641-0216.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Only the best of prose is poetry. Tom Eagle does write it. What a most wonderfully, flowering, foutaining imagination. Let me quote, “It was that sort of career, the first compression, devolving the hot erotic surrealistic line down into the word, into the concrete, into scatter-screens through which the emissions were, like psychic orgasms, planted flat iconic mutations of sequence without the grace of rhythm, synaptic firings from the cerebral cortex, they were that, those 1968 scatter poems a few got printed here and there, as if anybody noticed, he thought, horny for greatness, ….” And on and on for more than 200 worthwhile glorious greatness pages of Eagle onward. This is the best prose that is poetry - poetry that is a measure of all parts of a creative life with human condition rhythm. And this is it. Enough picnic basket and poetry language and adventure for the hungriest campers, enough Eros of all the arrows in bows, enough of life being unzipped… - a thoroughly worthwhile read. Gems all throughout everywhere like a bit of captured speech on page 141, “Something to do, really, a good hobby, poetry, but why not get a job!”