REVIEWS : : Off the Main Road
...The fine “Directions for Visitors” — Venn is off the main road, remember — has, along with a clever use of place names, this poet's serious playfulness which, with great variety of phrasing, mingles a feeling for the concrete with the fantastic. Venn's wit is present as well. Following a page and a half of directions, the fifth stanza ends:
...If you wait an hour or more
and I don't appear somehow,
I'm simply not the George you knew.
...If you wait an hour or more
and I don't appear somehow,
I'm simply not the George you knew.
—Rutsala, Vern. Review of Off the Main Road. “Extending Metaphors to Breaking Points.”
Willamette Week, 8 August 1978 (Fresh Weekly Section): 4-5.
Willamette Week, 8 August 1978 (Fresh Weekly Section): 4-5.
...Venn loves the world he sees around him, the world of places like Hells Canyon, Ohanapecosh and Bear Springs. He loves the simple hard honesty of their work, which he elegizes in sturdy secular litanies: “I know the faller's ax, polaski, froe,/ peavy, scythe, the cross cut saw.” I could say that instead of talking to himself, Venn charges out of the Muses' Temple to accost his readers in their daily lives, except that would be too simple. For in accosting us as a poet, Venn also wants to transform us into poets in our own right. As with Whitman, his exuberance in poems such as “Words” masks the humble faith that everyone is, or must become, a poet to his own experience.
—Boly, John. Review of Off the Main Road. “The Prescott Street Poets.” Oregon Magazine, August 1979: 72
The central poem of Off The Main Road, an uncommonly good new book, pleads for the poet's—or anyone's—right to be left alone with his own life.... Family (by extension, history) joins with the poet's passion for wilderness—wild plants, trees, animals, streams—to define him spiritually and give his character integrity. He must work at preserving this integrity, this aloneness that makes him human.
—Grunes, Dennis. Review of Off the Main Road. “Books Received.” Encore, Vol. III, 1978: 21
(full review here)
(full review here)
...This is a beautiful book–strong, honest, individual, important. Venn’s poetry combines rugged individualism, a profound sense of family history, a passion for nature and wilderness, and—the integrating matrix for all these–a tragic perception of the durable frailty of roots anchoring us to mortal memory.... In a magnificent poem, “Forgive Us...,” recently honored with a place in the fourth Pushcart Prize collection, Venn’s anger shapes his ironic awareness of mortal complicity in the conjunction of the long-ago spilt blood of his farmer Grandfather’s “butchering art,” his Grandfather’s now own passing—suffering—life and Venn’s life.***Vi Gale and Prescott St. Press have given us, at least once, one of our country’s great books.
—Grunes, Dennis. Review of Off the Main Road. “The Poets of Prescott Street.”
Small Press Review, Issue 80, Vol.11, No. 9, September, 1979:4.
Small Press Review, Issue 80, Vol.11, No. 9, September, 1979:4.
There's an openness in Off The Main Road which invites you to “lay a fire full of answers that tell you “Stay...unpack,” because these poems, like the book's last phrase, “just move in and in” with well-crafted exactness...
—Robbins, Martin. Review of Off the Main Road. St. Andrews Review,
Vol.3, No.3,1979: 128-129
Vol.3, No.3,1979: 128-129