So I hope you understand, when I ask you in my innocence / why is it, each and every time, / when aim should be best cadence, / every line must rhyme?, Tom East wonders, contradicting Robert Frost who once said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. Actually, in spite of all the constraints rhyming involves, East is equally comfortable with it, managing to give his poems the form that best suits them. Be they narrative or lyric, light or meditative, nostalgic or elegiac, they are the means by which the author, as a thorough tourist guide, takes the reader on a tour of his life which, like Shakespeare, he divides into seven stages and which, unlike the Bard, he calls The Seven Lies of Man. But don't be misled by the word lies. East uses it both as a noun and as a verb, in its various meanings, thus pointing to how devious one's destiny can be. The seasons he cuts scenes out of are not the four traditional ones either, although the latter do appear here and there to evoke events that only they can be the background of. His seasons are the time he spent attending pop festivals, going fishing or foxhunting, visiting war graves or art exhibitions or foreign countries, while the scenes include peculiar people he met, artists who have influenced him and whom he pays tribute to in a most original way, or just landscapes in which he is all by himself trying to merge with nature. Still, there are scenes where Tom East becomes Doubting Tom, getting angry, revolting against the Establishment and its inequalities. ;The adage - But Not That Sort of Season - that goes with the title refers, obviously, to death. Not that East fears it more than anyone else. To quote him: And the only dark place I fear / is the shadow in the corner / of my mind. More than that, although the poem that starts the collection is called A Prayer (hardly religious) and death is mentioned or hinted at several times, the book ends on a funny optimistic note - Now you'll be glad you went with me / Down that wandrin' Euphratee. / We'll take our tanks to the land of dreams: / It's essential ... yeah, we got a special relationship. A special relationship with a special poet who can find the shortcut to your mind and soul. PETRU IAMANDI ON GOODREADS.
