In his latest collection of forty-one new poems, Break Out, poet Eric Greinke demonstrates his comfort with the wide variety of poetic modalities and divergent compositional approaches for which he is known. Thematically, the collection is structured to maximize a readers mental flexibility and emotional empathy through alternative perspectives presented in the poems. The dominant theme of the book is the need of all sentient beings to escape from the many kinds of chains and prisons that capture them. Hailed by Charles Reznikoff as the best poet of his generation, at 72 years old Greinke continues to write poems that evoke our common human experiences in search of universal truths. The first, middle, and last poems (In Tree Light, Love Match, and From Mirror To You) are surrealistic lyric poems inspired respectively by French poets Yves Bonnefoy, Andre Breton and Claire Malroux. A series of couplet-based, ghazal-like, free-associative responses to the morning news on television (i.e. Monkey Time, Origins of Alchemy, and Break Out) are interwoven with poems written from the perspective of fish, birds and animals (i.e. Hunger, Bluegill Apocalypse, Waves, The Unseen, Trash) placed amid a core of topical objectivistic docu-poems inspired by Associated Press articles that address human rights in the context of social problems, such as human trafficking (i.e. Little Doll, The Trap, The Price), homelessness (i.e. The Cold, Locked Out), road rage (On The Road), racism (The Word), gang violence (The Dead), sexual abuse (The Secret), drug addiction (Unforgiven), sanctuary for illegal immigrants (Standing Room Only), mass shootings (No Cover) and hunger (Hunger Everywhere). Throw in a few surprises, (i.e. an acrostic imitation of Apollinire or the sardonic social cultural observations of Intensities In Ten Cities), and you have poetry that takes you for a ride, both inside and out.
Greinke is a spacious poet of Soul. There is an easy flow, an unstrained lucidity, a surreal exuberance about his poetry. The marvel of Greinke is the open window he has sustained throughout a long career of letters. Let us revere this great man of letters in lionlike Age; he gives us so much. - Charles Thompson, Various Artists (UK)
Eric Greinke carves an eclectic niche; like snowflakes, no two poems are exactly alike. He is at ease in many genres, which reside comfortably alongside each otherfrom poetry of the marvelous in the fine tradition of Rimbaud and Neruda, to the more traditional poems of Robert Frost. It is clear that the lovely universal landscape is where he chooses to spend most of his leisure hours. - Cindy Hochman, The Pedestal Magazine
Eric Greinkes poems, like messages in a bottle, found after so many years of being afloat, are the experiences of being within, the experiences of being in nature. Each poem is a cathedral of actuality, of thought, of inspiration. He takes our hand and shows us what we have forgotten to look at. - Irene Koronas, Boston Area Poetry Scene
There is a Blakeian energy to these poems that pulses through the shorter ones in particular in true Beat tradition, the senses are rhapsodic even at their most cataclysmic. The work has wide geographic reach. - Aileen La Tourette, The Journal (UK)
