Selected Comments

Petrushkin! contains an unusual number of successful poems...Perhaps it is Charach's day-job that accounts for his attention to emotional nuances.

"(Charach's) poems remind us how effective narrative and anecdote can be in poetry. They owe more to Checkhov and I.B. Singer than to Yeats or Wallace Stevens. (His) use of language is not dazzling; it is unobtrusive and utilitarian because his goal—rare nowadays—is to say something about the human condition. And he says it with a voice notable for its compassion and humour."
                     —Kenneth Sherman, The Globe and Mail

"Ron Charach's poetry — its expansiveness, its general extension of the boundaries (or so-called boundaries) of poetry, its political bite and pick-up from daily life — are all pleasures for the reader."
                     —Canadian poet Don McKay

"There's a quirkiness of perspective in Ron Charach's work which banishes the world of self-serving earnestness to the margins . . . I find myself thinking: if the social leg-hold traps we set for ourselves can't be got free of, at least we can look down and laugh."
                     —American-born Canadian poet/essayist Roo Borson

"No one else is quite like Ron Charach: his refusal to resort to poetic closure; his strength in portraying the depths of human experience; his confident use of the colloquial."
                     —Canadian poet and editor Rhea Tregebov

"One of the chief characteristics of Ron Charach's poetry is the light, but incisive, way he approaches his subject. While he deals with serious topics, he does so in a refreshingly oblique manner, poking holes in the poetic balloons of earnestness and self-importance. His poems are concrete and colloquial, avoiding generalizations and romantic insincerity. . . This poet brings to each poem a clinician's eye and a healer's compassion.
                     —American poet Jack Coulehan, editor of Blood and Bone: Poems, University of Iowa Press

Ron Charach's works copyright © to the author.