Comments

"In Solway's new book, where nearly every poem catches you off-guard with its originality, the collection itself proves to be the last ambush. Chess Pieces has not only stretched the received precincts of chess--endowing the game's idiom with an expressive potency it was never expected to have--but has also endowed poetry with an ampler metaphoric territory to roam. What more can we ask of our poets?"
                     —Carmine Starnino [Chess Pieces], Books in Canada

"Like Duchamp who gave up art for chess, Solway sees the ever-shifting contingencies of the chessboard as a poetic performance. The mind dancing over the board, the interactive pieces, the emerging patterns of the game, the tensions between opposing forces provide a framework for Solway's investigations� This collection� revels in erudite wit, refined allusions and complex syntax that modestly recognizes its own artifice, its own potential displacement by alternate pursuits of squash, sailing or the brokerage."
                     —Karl Jirgens [Chess Pieces], Books in Review

David Solway's works copyright © to the author.