A review by jakekilroy
Complete Poems by Ernest Hemingway

3.0

Hemingway's one hell of a novelist, but I can't say he's one hell of a poet. There's poetry in and to his works of fiction. They're beautiful, just gorgeous tales of love and loneliness. His complete collection of poems starts off with dopey rhymes, like they were for kids sports magazines at the time. It's hard to believe the same man who barreled through life would rhyme so many obvious words. But a decade or two after the Great War settled in him, sometime around the second one that conquered the world's attention, he really had something devastating to say. His war poems are heartbreaking and inspiring. Some of them rile me up, and some of them make me shutter. He uses phrases like "fuck-all" and "black-ass," so he does finally come around to being ahead of his time. But there's just too many moments of, "Come on, Hemingway." Shit, though, when he writes a good poem, it's seriously flooring. It ruptures my understanding of poetry. There's just too few in the pages.