100 Titles From Tom Beckett

Mark Young’s insightful, laser-sharp new poems in *100 Titles From Tom Beckett* invite paradox and chance to dance with the sparks and echoes of Tom Beckett’s hilarious, downtempo titles and Tom Fink’s paintings of spreading fractals and swirling ropes of color. Young’s humor and pathos sprinkled with inkblots of bathos illuminate this book. His magnetic fields tease the push/pull levers of constraint and release. “I seem to be attracted / to things that do not exist, no / beginning, no end. Non-end - // ities, if you like, until negated / which then creates them.” Young’s poems often playfully reflect upon their own development and diversion as they proceed, exposing an openness to process at each turn of phrase. It is a pure delight to see Young, Beckett, and Fink – three master poets in their own right – join hands in the creative adventure of this marvelously generous work. — Charles Borkhuis, author of *Rearview Mirror* Reading *100 Titles From Tom Beckett* makes me recall something I’ve sometimes thought about Mark Young’s poems: if all words created a block, the poet made poems by chiseling some of them out to fall randomly on the floor; the poet then assembled the words into lines and poems surface through a music created by breath and syllablic rhythm. These poems then are unique in that Mark volunteers that he actually tried to make his poems relate to the titles given by Tom Beckett. And yet the leap between title and text is not (always) linear, might be considered opaque in some cases, so that the reader's freedom of response is not diminished. What’s relevant to me is seeing how Beckett’s titles are such strong muses for Young’s poems. These poems present the play of brotherhood, as affirmed by Thomas Fink’s paintings where colors and shapes effect a harmony that couldn’t have been anticipated by each individual element before the painter joined them. Poems can be created through a multitude of ways and these results indicate the generative effect of affectionate brotherhood, while affirming that poetry succeeds by creating relationships and connections. — Eileen R. Tabios