David Bromige's A CAST OF TENS is a series of musings and reflections upon the full range of human experience. In his exact adherence to a form (ten-line sections usually broken into a few stanzas) and an inner form (phrases or sentences start with a capital letter, ending at the next capital) Bromige inserts as much variation and insight, where other writers may have found only restriction. A very "human" text, A CAST OF TENS proceeds in its unique voice with a quiet intensity never losing sight of its goal.--pg
Bromige is a master at probing the irreducibilities of symbolic logic, and his playful yet outrageous equivalencies explode the neat, cut-and-dried tautologies of Wittgenstein: "The old man is 112 pages long / and so is the sea / They are deeply symbolic (psychotic)." Bromige's structures are sinuous and mathematic, and they evoke the tonal colors of Schoenberg, Satie, or Cage, successfully evading what Bromige has characterized as iambic pentameter's "echoic invasions."--Susan Smith Nash
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
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Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1996.