Hard Times

With concise, vivid language, Bob Brown's poetry brings us into the prison of hard time. We sit with him on "small plastic chairs"...learning the yearnings of the incarcerated. The violence in these lives is not avoided in the poems. Yet, Brown's compassion and truth from these encounters resonates. If there is a theology of hope among the stories, then maybe coming to God will turn a life around. Hard Times: Poems of Enclosure is a succinct and compelling look at life behind the bars. These poems reveal in stark language those ... Who are "The Unknown." "The Unnamed."

-Sandra McGarry




The root of the word "despair" is away from hope. And yet these poems, poems of empathy, build human bridges toward hope, though never with ease. As the poet visits men in jail, responding to a request from his parish priest, he wonders, "Could they see my past in my face-years clean and sober now?" Into this place of imprisoned men, a place where time is hard, comes a visitor bringing word of forgiveness, but listening deeply, to the story and to the story under the story. Of the drunk driver, the murderer, the addict, the abuser. Stories in which every choice made has made a difference. And it becomes clear that the contact the poet makes is essential to him as well. In one case, a murder is interrupted by a man who arrives, knowing he needed to be there. Someone who left, "Unknown. / Unnamed." In another, the visitor doesn't know the outcome: "I never learned / the disposition / of his case." The poems themselves are largely narrative and simple on the surface; they reflect the spare setting. But as the reader enters the poems, much is revealed about what it means to be human. When a meeting is interrupted by a lockdown, the poet writes, "Also locked down, / I prayed for him." The interruptions occur often but do not deter the visitor, who offers his humanity, compassion, attention, and belief.

-Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan, & it had rained, Thresh & Hold,

and Swan, What Shores?




I'm grateful for these poems in which Bob Brown chronicles his time as a lay religious counselor serving prison inmates. His reports offer sustained insight into how we come to be who we are, insight into the souls of those who daily return to relative freedom and those who may never be free again. Along the way, the poems imply we might well ask ourselves which is which.

-ROMTVEDT