In this virtuoso display of sonnets, free verse, prose poems, villanelles, ghazals, and aphorisms, People’s Poet Robert Priest makes it clear why the Pacific Rim Review has called him “surely the most imaginatively inventive poet in the country.” A profound meditation on love, death, sex, and sickness, If I Didn’t Love the River speaks directly to the polarizations of our time. Priest’s mastery of dark satire, lyric ebullience, erotic verse, and the pithy maxim is as gratifying as it is unique and will appeal to the yearning for poetry, which so often goes unsatisfied in the reading public. No emotional territory — from angst, anger, anguish, and despair to whimsical delight — is off-limits here. Intent on releasing reverberations from the full depths and heights of what it is to be human, this is Robert Priest at his protean best.
From John Robert Colombo of Colombo’s Canadian Quotations:
Ages have passed since I have opened a newly published collection of poetry, read the first poem, and then muttered to myself, “That’s brilliant!” Then I read the second, third, and fourth poems, muttering to myself “Wonderful … deeply moving … fantastic!” Unbelievable as it may seem, each and every one of the eighty poems in If I Didn’t Love the River is outstanding, “a keeper.” They were composed by Robert Priest. One of his poems concludes with these two lines: “perhaps my silent wonder / pleases you as I walk by.” It certainly does.