Shadow Ball

'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.

Hurray for Shadow Ball! Now the best of Charles Harper Webb's brilliant and funny poems are packed into one book. And the new ones are just as good. Here is a major poet of the twenty-first century who makes us laugh but also gulp uneasily at his spooky knowledge of human nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.