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On a globe usurped by the deafening forces of empire, can we find each other once again in the common spirit’s mighty hush? The poems in Hush have faith in that possibility.
Robert Martens’ poems are like bread. Spare, lean and pacifist, they bring out that little bit of inner Mennonite in all of us. These are carefully carpentered works infused with the small town fuel of coffee, dreams and whisky. As always, they ring with Martens’ God-watched voice. “Instant Karma,” an antic Buddhist-Anabaptist meditation is worth the whole collection, an instant classic.
~ Trevor Carolan, Department of English/Creative Writing,
University of the Fraser Valley
There is much that can be heard when the soul is meditative, receptive and hushed. hush reveals, at a deeper level, those things we need not hear and, more to the poignant and telling point, what is needful to hear the more we distance ourselves from the madding crowd.
~ Ron Dart, Department of Political Science/Philosophy/Religious Studies, University of the Fraser Valley
This is a covertly powerful book formed by a fine sensibility. The poems are like raindrops falling on the skin of consciousness, with unexpected rays of the sun lighting up the hidden. This is poetry as “last defence,” before things vanish into “the world’s great silence.”
~ Lilija Valis, poet and word artist
Robert Martens grew up in a village founded by Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union. Still in his teens, he leapfrogged several centuries into the postmodern milieu of student politics at Simon Fraser University. Robert subsequently settled in Abbotsford, BC, where he writes poems and enjoys the spoiled existence of the wealthy West. He has co-written and co-edited histories, anthologies, and periodicals. Robert is grateful for poetry, music, movies, friends and family, and for his cat, who sleeps soundly through the injustices of this world. | |