Credo
Description
The elegance, verbal felicitousness, and subtle crafting that were the signature qualities of Carmine Starnino's debut, The New World, are once again on display in his second book, Credo. Whether the subject is a passport, a clothesline, an antique goblet, prayer, or archaic English words, Starnino exercises an arresting mixture of wit and wordplay that rejoices in its own resources, its own cadence and diction. Credo places Starnino in the forefront of a new generation of Canadian poets.
Reviews
"Starnino's [poetry] is remarkably assured, highly stylized, elegant in its simple formality ... the narrator of his poems speaks to the part of the reader that believes in a perfect thing." Marlene Cookshaw, The Malahat Review "Genuinely moving meditations on love, grief, and art's eternal durability ... From the city that blessed us with Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, and transplanted Montrealer Irving Layton comes a thrilling new voice." Judith Fitzgerald, The Toronto Star "Unafraid of emotion or intellect, grounded in a reverence for ancestry and art, and buoyed by a kind of serious wonder at the joy of existence, Starnino never makes a cheap play for attention or tries to reflect his concerns forever back upon himself. Even when he writes about his family, as he often does, it is always with a marvelous combination of intimacy and artistic detachment." Tim Bowling, Books in Canada