NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is a remarkable sequence of love poems. Shaw has mapped his emotional landscape with a unique and unforced style. Most poets wait years before they can write publishable love poems; poems that aren't drowned at birth in tears of anguish or adoration, littered with wet cliches and bent-over-backwards rhyme. These poems articulate, brilliantly, those raging tides of emotion that have swept through the lives of most young men at one time or another. These are modem poems - though if Brooke had been born in 1973 and not 1887 he might have written similarly: from POWDER THE FLIGHT OF MOTHS

	in the singe and snap of light and bum, 
	which is what draws them against you, 
	you with your unknowable, sad, flame. 

	i come the same way, strong with want, 
	determined to splinter your filament, yes, 
	as if there were no other gravity but you.

	she'd never had religion until she lit the candle, 
	made a prayer for all she wanted, the voices to stop 
	and some ice cream soda. we wanted ice cream soda. 
	it was november, the sky green and city quiet.

	don't you think 

	if i had something as good 
	as matchless silence 
	it would be laid before you.