From the Deck: Poetry by Robert Brennan

Countless schemes for organizing this book have come and gone: themes, perhaps, those about nature, followed by comments on the plights of mankind, love, sadness, humor, politics, and others.

Upon reflection, Robert Brennan realized that such an order did not reflect the characteristics of how he writes or how he thinks or, in fact, how the world unfolds before his eyes. In truth, His afternoon walks along the road that has inspired words about aging against a sunset differ from those inspired by the moving in and out of sadness in the evening news.

As in everyman's mind, the flow is steady and varied and punctuated by moments of lucidity and wonder, by moments of fear and anguish and peacefulness and great sorrow and all elements of human thinking and feeling.

Still, while each of us experiences periods in our lives of prolonged states of mind and heart, as when we are heartbroken over the loss of a loved one, life in its totality is - for good or for bad - a moving screen.

This book is not arranged in categories. There might be pages near each other that are similar in content and tone. In other cases, the subject from one page to the next might be radically different. It is intended that each page stands on its own, which again, for good or bad, more faithfully reflects how my poems arise.

Recognizing that some structural order is needed, I have chosen the one that is the most dependable and familiar of all: chance, pure, unadulterated chance. Arbitrariness follows. The fact that it is totally arbitrary, in this case, is something that we all will have to live with; however, in a special irony, although the actual content of the work is arranged arbitrarily, the pages of the book are more or less in alphabetical order. Go figure. Here is the ultimate orderliness, sparing with ambiguity, like a challenge. Read on.