The Destroyer in the Glass (Volume 110) (Yale Series of Younger Poets) Paperback – March 29, 2016

If you read poetry you will instantly recognize a dazzling new voice. Warren is the real deal and we can only wait in great anticipation for what will follow these gems.

Beautiful, sensitive poetry lines to be read over and over, and some not to be forgotten- ever.

I'm not kidding. When I enter into this book, which I have several times over the last few books, I am entering a temple. I feel the same way as when I read GC Waldrep's pears in a church, glowing light--at least I think that's what those pears were doing, at least in my mind they were and still glow there. I don't remember the details but I am swept up in something that feels holy like worship and it's that state itself, a kind of state of abstraction that just feels so good. This manuscript was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Carl Phillips, who writes the forward to the book so eloquently, in a way I am too daffy to pull off here in this Amazon review. But I know what Phillips means when he says about Noah Warren and these poems, "What communion requires is empathy, that ability to extend oneself in such a way as to inhabit and know the self of another--" and paraphrasing Phillips, that's hard enough when we struggle already with the difficulty of "self-knowing." Every workshop graduate is taught to avoid the abstract at all costs in writing poetry, and maybe the unintended result is that poets often run away from philosophy, from the metaphysical, from the big ideas in their work--unless the weight of those ideas are carried on the back of a dormouse. Don't get me wrong, Warren certainly opens the door of his poems to the particular: the skunk cabbage, the alders, Roger's Brook. But he also is more interested or fascinated or whatever it is with such things as "The Cove of Now and Then." I'm really happy he went there. Oh and that's another thing! He's a pilgrim, wandering all over the place but not collecting the details alone--he's still interested in standing on the edge of the cliff and taking it all in, looking out over the horizon and the big picture and asking the big questions. I, for one, am really pleased he does. This work was published in 2016, and it was a sweeping and dazzling introduction to a poet of great sensitivity and intelligence. I can't wait to see where he's gone or goes next.

Seriously. If I were the nephew of Rosanna Warren and the grandson of Robert Penn Warren and a graduate of Yale, would I even enter, should I even be allowed to enter The Yale Younger Poets prize? I was a reader for the YYPP 20 years ago and there was no anonymity. Unless something has changed, readers, editors, and the judge knew who the poets were because it was written on the envelope and the MS. For 2015 it says there were over 500 entries, did judge Carl Phillips read them all and did he read them blindly? This is the thing, as a writer I would never enter because of questions like mine. It can't help but look like nepotism and you'll never know if you're actually any good or if it's all just because of who you are and who you know. As for the poems, a couple were nice. The rest were "good" in that you'd encourage a young writer to keep writing and reading and having more real life experiences to deepen the content and hone the craft. It's like Gwyneth Paltrow winning that Oscar so young for "a job well done" for a performance that you enjoy in a good movie, but forget soon after.