Colin Harrington reviews Knock-knock by Owen Lewis in Ink Sweat and Tears.
“The epigraph to Owen Lewis’s new work of poetry, Knock-knock (Dos Madres Press, 2024), makes reference to a quote from the Porter in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which many see as a very welcome break from all the madness and murder taking place in the play, meant perhaps to bring a moment of wryly comic relief:
Knock, knock! Who’s there, in the other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator … O, come in, equivocator
In the opening poem, we join the narrator in what at first is recognizable as the pleasure of the rhythmic tapping of an umbrella on a sidewalk and the musings of a busy man:
Prelude: How I Started to Use a Cane
…
The tap-step’s the only sure thing,
even as my daughter’s name
my very own first-born’s name
slips my mind and I almost slip
from the sudden blank shock of it, . . . .”
