In Their Own Words

Tom Roby, his book, and his title poem are all shape shifters. The poem takes the image of a plastic bag before the wind, goes beyond the record of aesthetic delight in natural phenomena seen in American Beauty, and tracks the bag's journey through a series of forms and meanings. Similarly, his book presents the discerning reader with a journey through the various intersections of his poet's voice and the many formal patterns he uses to convey his thoughts and feelings. As a worthy poet, he adopts a variety of persona, not merely from the various remembered stages of his life, but from a cast of narrators--humans, caricatures, personified beings, and omniscient sages--crossing them with a variety of perspectives and intentions--humorous, serious, ironic, challenging, insightful, soulful, and fantastical. Yet, throughout this variety of shape shifting, there is nothing bewildering, inconsistent, incoherent, tedious, or repetitive. These poems retain the undeniable strokes of Roby's work, and you know that same delight in seeing him always in his poems as you feel knowing the power of that plastic bag to carry effortlessly the weight of gull, butterfly, albino cat, jellyfish, and tetherless kite.