Counting Bricks by Gary Metras is reviewed by Dennis Daly in Boston Areas Small Press and Poetry Scene.
“Mnemonic sentiment, boiled down to its essential, tear-charged elements, cannot be ignored. It drives human nature. It mobilizes the emotions. It guides our unruly impulses toward goodness. Poets who completely excise sentimentality from their art do so at their own peril. Thankfully, Gary Metras is not one of those poets.
Metras, in his new poetry collection, Counting Bricks, injects physical awe and unusual detail into the ordinariness of passion and its rolling tides of melancholy and elation. His precise, yet down-to-earth, verbiage contains and grounds any unseemly maudlin excess.
The poet’s opening piece entitled Splinter engages the peculiar bond between mother and child. He reduces the extraction of an everyday splinter into a series of detailed components. Using first his adult perception, then morphing into his child-memory, Metras nails the moment. From the beginning of the procedure to its end, specifics trump pain and fear (although both wait patiently in abeyance). Metras’ pre-teen protagonist concludes the poem this way,”
