Disturbing the Buddha

Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster's fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck--the "three-leaf clovers" so much more plentiful than the four. Dempster's wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to lif'’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a...