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Reviews of previous books:
"I recommend [it] enthusiastically to all libraries, all teachers of poetry, and all readers open to the wonderful diversity of our contemporaries.... [A] delicate fusion of wit and humor contributes to the complex humanity of his portraits of others." —Beloit Poetry Journal
"There is a technical facility in Wormser's poems, to be sure; these couplets, triplets, quatrains seem effortlessly and justly constructed.... To my mind, one of the most impressive qualities in Wormser's work is his capacity to express insights perfectly and memorably. He is a poet who offers readers little gifts of revelatory precision." —Maine Times "All the characters in this volume of poetry, whether the author created them or not, have a commonality of realness, in the sense that they evoke a personal, human truth.... There is a commonness that somehow, when drawn out, appears to have an aspect of beauty.... Wormser is a wordsmith." —ForeWord Magazine
Poems from book read by Garrison Keillor on "Writer's Almanac"
Poem from book reprinted in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 1, 2004
Each poem in Baron Wormser's sixth collection, Subject Matter, is fourteen-lines. In the tradition of works such as Robert Lowell's Notebook, Wormser uses this form to concisely pursue a wide range of topics. The sixty-one poems range in tone from fierce to wry, from tender to brisk, from quizzical to evocative, just as the topics range from tattoos to Buddhism, from truck driving to Israel, from global warming to orgasms. What all the poems share is a willingness to pursue uneasy truths, a willingness to encounter how deeply the public realm touches the private realm. Wormser is known as a narrative/dramatic poet. In Subject Matter he uses that impulse to generate "sonnets" that have great energy as they enact the argued compression for which the sonnet is justly famous. Faced with the welter of subjects the contemporary world offers, Wormser has chosen, at once, to directly engage those subjects and to celebrate the syntactic and rhythmic variations the venerable form offers. Louis Simpson observed that Wormser has written poetry that "is an answer to those who say that contemporary poetry doesn't speak of important matters or that it is obscure." Subject Matter offers poems that are utterly accessible and deeply intelligent. They can be read again and again as they celebrate the means of poetry, what Wormser calls in his poem, "Anecdotes," "the beneficence of a minor spell."
Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry, a poetry chapbook, a collection of short stories, a memoir, and is the coauthor of two books about teaching poetry. He directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005. He lives with his wife in Cabot, Vermont.
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