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8 oeuvres 38 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

Œuvres de Randy Cribbs

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I picked up the little book Ancient City Treasures by Randy Cribbs at some gift shop or another here in St. Augustine. It's a book of poems about St. Augustine, a "unique gift book" according to the back cover. Translation: the poems aren't supposed to be good, just quaint and kitschy.

Cribbs pretty much delivers on that. It may be unfair to judge the poems in Ancient City Treasures as if they were serious works; Cribbs undoubtedly knows he won't win any awards with these poems. Some of them, however, are surprisingly good for what they are.

Ancient City Treasures includes 55 poems total, all very short and revolving around the culture and history of St. Augustine. My biggest concrete complaint is that Cribbs is often very vague, essentially asking his readers, most of whom aren't overly familiar with St. Augustine, to fill in the blanks and know what he's talking about. For example, Cribbs uses the word "that" a lot, usually followed by a vague reference, i.e. "that society", "that plank bed", "that old Ponce place", "that Spanish king", and "that great fort of stone". The natural questions that arise, but are not answered, are "what society?", "what plank bed?", "what old Ponce place?", "what Spanish king?", etc. Should the reader look up which Spanish king was reigning "four centuries ago"? Or research what society "guards" the "library further down" on Aviles Street? Pretty unfair to the reader, in my opinion.

I liked that Cribbs doesn't necessarily white wash St. Augustine, as one might tend to do in a book meant for tourists. He addresses one of the prevalent sites in downtown St. Augustine: homeless people. Two poems, "Charlie" and "Street People", describe this issue.

My favorite poem in the collection, by far, is on page 89 - "Early on St. George". This poem is very short, but focuses intently on the auditory imagery of the scene described. It works well. The few other poems that stood out are "Lighthouse Porch", "Oldest House", "Renovation", "Barracks", "Tyler", "Hog", and "Tour Train".

While some gems hide among the pages of Ancient City Treasures by Randy Cribbs, most of the poems are fool's gold, meant for tourists to take home and gift to friends.
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Signalé
ReadHanded | May 31, 2012 |

Statistiques

Œuvres
8
Membres
38
Popularité
#383,442
Évaluation
½ 2.5
Critiques
1
ISBN
8