In Wheelchair Dancer, David Pointer puts together a litany of everyday sins and commonplace travesties. While this collection of poetry has a rocky start, it soon settles into a series of meditations on the stark and edgy, the beautiful and mysterious. Pointer isn’t so much a poet as a sharp-eyed prose writer arranging his words in verse. He manages actual free verse a few times, which adds precision and pop to his words but can never hold it for long. His disturbing little vignettes are not without an appreciation of beauty or simple luxuries, and the decision to use the poetic form seems to have distilled and tempered his writing in ways that the prose form could not. This is actually a group of poems even nonpoetry-junkies could enjoy, and I don’t say something that crazy too often. (J. Blackmore)
by David Pointer, Poetry, $6.50, 28 pgs, Time Barn Books, 529 Barrywood Drive, Nashville, TN, 37220-1636, thetimegarden.com