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“In George Looney’s masterful book-length poem, Structures the Wind Sings Through, a torn-up road under repair provides a starting point for a moving meditation on human loss, music, art, language, and storytelling,” writes Doug Ramspeck, author of Mechanical Fireflies. “This is not a linear narrative but a discursive palimpsest where sparrows become a woman “flagman” or convicts in a half-way house or a fat man listening for a secret message or a Sioux woman humming what might be tribal music or a man who has lost his leg from the knee down. Here is dust rising from the road and constructing itself into the human shape. Here is a book simultaneously novelistic in scope and lyrical in its intensity, containing the many rich pleasures of both.”
“Couplets and trailer parks, Caravaggio and Hopper, woman and man, the circus and the dance, words and roads, hearts and the feathers of sparrow and wren, barstools, faith, tractors, memory: these are the structures the wind sings through,” says Kathy Fagan, author of Lip. “I love and envy these sentences that bend under the weight of their losses like tightropes. George Looney’s book-length poem—mournful, musical, mysterious—surely earns a place among our era’s most accomplished long poems.”
And Richard Carr, author of Lucifer, writes, “The cantos of George Looney’s latest poetry collection create a world of loss and abandonment. The poetry sings, however, of the sublime discovered in the mundane, and ultimately we find solace in the music of the heart. In the grand ‘Coda,’ the speaker’s lonely, probing, searching voice finally unites with all the preceding cantos’ characters—once mere structures, irreconcilable, now fully human—and in the climax the reader is lifted into this humanity, ‘and each of us rises / to embrace the man or woman or child / we came with.’ Elevating us to its own great height, Structures the Wind Sings Through is a masterwork of thought and feeling and the music of poetry.”
