Vernal Pool

“They were playing the hits from ’66 on / KFOG this morning. I was meeting my wife / At the oncologist. ” So begins Vernal Pool, the title poem of David Shaddock’s insight-ripe collection. A disciple and scholar of the great Denise Levertov, Shaddock writes with formal alacrity and informal clarity. In language you feel and trust, he sticks up for justice, social and intimate. While the American War in Vietnam defined his anxious coming-of-age, Shaddock, like Levertov—his artistic and spiritual guide—applies to everything else in his life lessons learned from that fiery era. Not only do these poems touch base with crucial human struggles and issues; they bust moves, they take risks. Throughout the tender, mindful pages of Vernal Pool, Spring breaks 24/7.
—Al Young, California’s former poet laureate
David Shaddock's beautifully crafted revisionary sonnets startle with their swift leaps and quickening flashes of memory. To quote one of his own insightful lines, they “are a bit like Cornell boxes. / Everything inside becomes its own little world.” And all the intricate interiors point outward, to our own tough or tender selves.
—Sandra M. Gilbert, poet, critic, Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita, University of California, Davis