The United Colors of Death

by Mark Terrill. 47 pages. 3003. Pathwise Press. P.O. Box 2392, Bloomington, IN. 47402. https://openlibrary.org/publishers/Pathwise_Press

Book Review by Michael Basinski

[email protected] or https://home.bluemarble.net/~charter/btgin.htm $5.95.

Mark Terrill lives in Germany and he is out of work. He has a bit of experience, like cook, postal worker, and welder. But for now, wisely, the poem is first. And in his poems he has life and death in each of his poetry hands and there they are and God in between and there you have the powers about which Terrill’s poem orbit. If he didn’t do it with balance, and grace, with humor and shocks wonder, I would have tossed the poems to the walrus. But let me give you a title: WHAT GOD SAID TO MICKEY MOUSE WHILE JAMES DEAN WAS TUNING UP HIS PORSCHE. It goes on. There is this beautiful sense of humor in all of this tremendously important philosophical pondering stuff, which makes the poems so human, so absolutely human as to be those blossoming sparks of treetops and mountain-tops, hot dogs, light bulbs, nail polish, post-its and cured cancer that makes it a wonder to be living in the fall of the year.