Herb Kauderer
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Picture
Moon Facts by Bob Schofield 2015 Nostrovia! Press Chapbook.  nostroviatowriting.com.  33 pages.  Free online at: http://www.nostroviatowriting.com/uploads/9/0/3/8/9038323/moon_facts_by_bob_schofield__online_release_.pdf
 
Moon Facts is one of the three 2015 winners of the Nostrovia! Chapbook contest which results in a limited print version of the book.  After that is sold out, the book is available for free online as a PDF.  Two poems from the book were nominated for 2015’s Pushcart Prize. 
 
There is not much information readily available about the author other than his publishing record.  The book contains 24 pages of poetry, nicely designed, with illustrations.  Perhaps a quarter of the poems are prose poems.  All poems are titled “FACT #__” fill in the blank, and they are indeed, little known facts about the moon, or as the book styles it THE MOON.
 
To be clear, these are poems rich in figurative language, and well outside any semblance of realism.  For example, FACT #011 includes:
 
          THE MOON ties The Ocean to its throat
          Jumps from chair to chair
 
          Because this is still
          the dawn of time
 
          and the floor is lava
 
Portions of the book lapse into nonsense and word salad, and somehow I loved it anyway.  For example, this from the prose poem FACT #284:
 
          “THE MOON travels exclusively by old wooden ship.  Now it is nighttime in Trinidad. 
          A one-eyed tree sits smoking a pipe.  Two men pledge their love to the same parrot.”
 
The sense of humor that runs throughout is best served in the author’s deadpan delivery.  There are a few examples of him reading poems from the book posted on the homepage for the book.
 
Overall I generally lack the patience for extended bouts of such nonlucid writing, but this book worked for me.  In fact, it was so much a sort of delicious indulgence that I’ve read it at least four times already.  It is not the kind of book you stop in the middle of.  Its rhythms exist not just on a poem by poem basis, but across sections, and across the whole book.  I would pay a good-sized cover charge to see the whole book performed at a poetry slam.  But it reads well, too.
 
-Herb Kauderer

Originally appeared in the SFPA Poetry Book Reviews Page Fall 2016, and excerpted in Star*Line

  • Home
    • About
    • Contact
    • Orthopedic Horseshoes
  • Academics
    • Teaching Experience
    • Education
    • Courses Taught
    • Professional Affiliations & Recognitions
    • Academic Presentations & Related Materials
    • Full Curriculum Vitae
  • Poetry
    • Poetry Chapbooks & Other Books
    • Poetry Samples
    • Links to My Poetry On-Line
    • "My First 508"
    • Interviews and Featured Poet appearances
    • Featured Readings
  • Writing
    • Accolades
    • Drama
    • Book Reviews >
      • 'Sacrificial Nights'
      • Moon Facts by Bob Scholfield
      • What Stranger Miracles
      • Crowned: Sign of the Dragon Book 1
      • 'The Role of Lightning in Evolution'
      • 'Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek' by Timons Esaias
      • Brief Encounters with My Third Eye
    • Flash Fiction Links
    • Prose >
      • Short Fiction Bibliography
      • "A Dwarf for Each"
      • "Standard Repair"
      • "Sense of Place, Sense of Mystery"
      • Intro - Come-on from the Horse on 7th Avenue
      • "No Sense Fighting"
  • The SCA
    • SCA Photos 1
    • SCA Photos 2
    • Precedence for Andreas Hak
    • SCA Persona
    • Offices Held in the SCA
    • SCA Writings >
      • Serenity: A History of Eastern Coronets
      • "The Origin of The Betting Man's Guide
      • "The New Newsletter"
      • Old Newsletters
      • "The New Newsletter"
      • "When the VOID Was One"
      • "The Hael's First Baronial Champions Event"
      • "Aftermeetings: An Excuse to Tell Svid Stories"
      • "The Origin of Aethelmearc's Ancestral Pelican Medallion"
      • Remembering Durlome Rakesh d'Mithnan (Dwarf)
      • Growth Chart of Kingdoms for the First 23 Years of the SCA
      • Doings... An incomplete and informal chronology of the earliest days of Aethelmearc
      • History of the East Kingdom
  • Something Like a Blog