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Book Reviews
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Poems in Transit, 1957 - 2004
by Bob Potter
(Solstice Press, Santa Barbara, 2004,109 pp. www.BobPotter.org)
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For all who wonder where this country is taking us, Bob Potter opens a window the enormous paradoxes we face with his own half-century of poetry and photos. Poems in Transit starts in the present with “The Ballad of 2004,” written just before the 2004 re-election and set to a Woody Guthriesque tune:
Buy him a one-way ticket to Crawford, Texas, Fourteen Hundred Miles from Washington D.C., And on that long, long ride, with Dick Cheney by his side, He’ll see just what he tried to do to you and me…
He’ll see graveyards of our soldiers killed in battle, In a needless war for oil in Iraq, Making millions for the Halliburton swindlers – But the ones who paid the price ain’t coming back.
Send him home! …
Besides being vice-president of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace, Potter is a retired professor of dramatic art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has written 27 plays produced at various university and professional theatres. He made his debut in 1969 with an anti-war satire about the Vietnam War (loosely disguised as the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece). Capturing his thoughts before his first audience streamed in, his poem “Notes in an Empty Theatre,” appears near the end of the book, eerily presaging this latest war still going on in 2005.
… In the actuality of right now Here in the darkness We join an accomplished fact, And the past is once again a metaphor, Yesterday is tomorrow, about to be Happening again, …
Bob Potter invites us fellow transients along on the trail to the post-millennium blues from his birth in the Depression, passing through San Francisco’s Beat Generation and the five wars during his lifetime. Irony, humor and fine style make an unforgettable read.
Rosemary Wilvert
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