Webb at his best is genuinely funny and genuinely reliable in his reactions to the dilemmas of middle-aged American men . . . many brisk, sparkling lines.”
—Publishers Weekly
“For over two decades I've been reading, with great pleasure, the utterly unique poems of Charles Harper Webb. Operating somewhere between the lyric and the narrative—that rich grasslands where absolute clarity and reverberant mystery can happily exist—Shadow Ball shows us why we love poetry: it tries to tell us the truth and because the truth is often painful it sometimes makes us laugh. I can't wait to stand on a chair, wave this book in my hand, and shout: 'Read this book, citizens, read this book!'”
—Thomas Lux
“'Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!'” Walt Whitman declared, and Charles Webb has come bursting through with great vitality and energy, with his sly wit and his dark irony, his funny bone and his rage, his rock-and-roll sensibility and his American gift for gab, his skepticism and his faith, his cunning art. It is a joy to have this life's work gathered together.”
—Edward Hirsch
“Webb’s poems deserve the visibility and careful reading [this new volume] will give them. ‘Shadow Ball’ presents a complex sensibility in poems as deep as they are clear. . . .Webb’s chief rhetorical mode in all his work is hyperbole. Fertility of invention is his main characteristic . . . Excess and strangeness vivify his verbal imagination.”
—Michigan Quarterly Review
“Shows us the full and hearty scope of human experience, shaped by music and keen perception, all through poems that are carefully crafted for sound, pacing and metaphor. ‘Shadow Ball’ illuminates the range of Webb’s strange talent, a talent rooted, perhaps, in his background as a rock musician and psychotherapist, which makes him particularly skilled at capturing the small moments, the cadence and power of ordinary revelations, the drama, melodrama, tragicomedy and music in the life of Everyman, himself included.”
—Rattle
“Webb’s poetry, while comic, is full of a poignant sense of the evanescence of things, for Webb is a great noticer. . . .Read this collection and be entertained.”
—Main Street Rag
Webb at his best is genuinely funny and genuinely reliable in his reactions to the dilemmas of middle-aged American men: “My head's a planet with failing gravity,” he writes in “Losing My Hair”; “One by one its people fall into the sky.” This selection from five earlier books should confirm the esteem in which other poets hold his comic talents. The baby boom can seem inescapable: “Comebacks,” one of 14 new poems, considers “The Eagles” and “Robert Plant in '69”: “Don't all of our bands break up, our shows shut down,/ agents stop returning our calls?” Webb's humor sometimes suggests David Kirby or even Billy Collins, as in pieces called “Prayer to Tear the Sperm-Dam Down,” “Teachers' Names” (“ 'May I Have a Hall Pass, Mrs. Titsworth, Please?' ”) and even “I Have Much Better Poems than This.” When Webb shifts to seriousness, his advice becomes reliable but predictable, too (“Love freely. Treat ex-partners as kindly/ as you can”). Such lack of ambition may send away some readers: others, though, will deeply enjoy this affable writer's many brisk, sparkling lines. (Sept.)
