The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006

by Hans Ostrom

The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom, is a rich collection of poetry on a broad range of subjects. Some poems are set in and concern Ostrom's native region, the High Sierra... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1598581023
• ISBN13: 9781598581027
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Places, People, Situations, and Laughs

Just finished reading The Coast Starlight, a collection of poetry by Hans Ostrom, who is the chair of the English Department at the University of Puget Sound. This is Ostrom's twelfth book. His previous works include the novel Three to Get Ready, Subjects Apprehended, which is another collection of poetry, and Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, an acclaimed, multi-genre bible of writing guides and prompts. The Coast Starlight contains a total of 156 poems. I enjoyed reading them very much. Ostrom's poetry is observant and thoughtful. "Tacoma Blues" captures the funky atmosphere around Tacoma, Washington. Rain comes down constantly. Birds wear miners' lamps. Rich people visit just to laugh at you. Your relatives drive through without stopping. "Hick" is a character study of a man who eats too fast, walks too slowly, hangs on to old things, and watches the entitled with an inexplicable fascination. There is a large presence of nature throughout the collection, too. Poems like "Hurricane Season," "Tornado in the Pennsylvania Hills," and "Fox and You" deal with the relationship between nature and humans (among other things, nature keeps an encyclopedia on you, as revealed in the last poem of that list). The poetry is also imaginative. Emily Dickinson meets Elvis Presley in Heaven in one poem. They get along just fine. Emily teaches Elvis about half rhymes. Elvis puts Emily's poems to song. Also paired in Heaven (in other poems): Jack Benny and T.S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire and Richard Brautigan, Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth...Freud watches Babe [...], and gets discontented whenever Babe breaks wind and belches. Other food for the imagination: poems like "Career," which throws a twist in the saying, "He worked at a company for years." And "Whereabouts Unknown," in which Einstein's theory of relativity becomes key in defining the narrator's relationships. Finally, the poems are often full of wit and humor. The premise of "Peaceheads:" powers in the world have started an arms race collecting, well, peaceheads, and the threat of worldwide peace grows larger by the day. "Permission to Treat the Witness as Hostile" contains a very logical linguistic argument about why the narrator can't tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. And "Social Interaction" gives a very good reason as to why you should sometimes turn around and say hello to that stranger walking behind you. The Coast Starlight reminds me of a friend I had in middle school, named Zac. I remember Zac because he was a heck of a lot more observant than me (Ever notice how Mr M----- just swings his knees directly into the opening underneath his desk whenever he sits down?), had a much more active imagination (I wonder what would happen if we flipped his desk around?), and had a great sense of humor, to boot (Let's do it!). I enjoyed stuff like that. Liked hanging around him. Liked the times I spent with him. Same goes for Ostrom's book.