Assignment 4: Book Review

For assignment number four I chose the book Strangers by David Ferry. I found this book to be a very interesting book of poems. The poems in this book are very intriguing, and the majority of the writings in this book are poems that deal with feelings of intimacy and familiarity. What makes this a very interesting book to read besides the fact he is telling a story along the way is that in his poems when he talks about these familiar things (usually daily activities) and spins them into a sort of unfamiliar world. I feel that in this unfamiliar world he has created in these poems, he is relating back to his own life and his experiences in the world. He starts off the book, at what I presume to be his Father's tomb. Then as he goes on, he writes the next few poems about what he does after he visited the tomb. The next few poems then go on to describe these activities he did after he visited his Father. What is interesting is that in these poems from his daily activities, is that he relates these activities to things that we can never predict or know. Such as he is at the bus stop and sees this old lady on the bus and asks himself if death can take him. Ferry then goes on and ends this poem by saying the bus went away it took the old lady away. I feel that this shows he is really trying to say throughout this book is that death comes sudden and we cannot predict when we are going to die. After he describes his events after the tomb visit he then almost switches to what is seems like a time before his Father died. Here is where he describes simple daily activities of others, and himself. This is where I feel he is describing things in life that make him happy and these are some of the events that lead up to his Father's eventual death by cancer just before the end of the book. Then, Ferry, begins to gear his poems in the next section towards memories of his Father and Great Grand Father. Which in turn eventually lead up to where he arrives at the graveyard of his Father's tomb. He then ends his last poem with the stanza
What is going to be in this place?
A person entering a room?
Saying something? A Signaling?
Writing a formula on the blackboard
Something not to be understood
I feel that this last stanza really grasps the theme Ferry was reaching for in this book. I think that is we never know what is going to happen in the future, death is uncertain, and we have no way of knowing what comes after death. It is just something that is not understood nor will it ever probably be understood. These poems in this book I feel help us confront the unknowns of our familiar everyday life.
In this book David Ferry has a very interesting style of writing. The majority of poems are very similar to that of free verse and haiku. This also means that his style of writing consists of short (some incomplete) sentences and short poems. What I found particularly intriguing about David Ferry's poems is that they all are very unpredictable from poem to poem and this I realized really helped me keep reading through this book to find out exactly what message and story he is trying to tell in this book.