WHAT THE CRITICS SAY
on No Parking
Immortal brevities!
-
John Robert Colombo
So there are also poets around me in whom I see the occasional illuminations
of vision. One of these is Tom Konyves, now in Vancouver, whose Selected
Poems has just appeared. At the end of his poem "No Parking" we have this visionary passage, which echoes with powerful mythology, then explodes
in a series of random and cryptic contemporary images.
- Louis Dudek
on Poetry in Performance
Konyves is after large collaborations: between sight and sound,
form and content, environment and art, poetry and technology, conception
and performance, the audience and the poet. Removing words from
a linear context is part of Konyves' war of imagination against rationalism:
war
against any hard line, political or artistic, which is exclusive
or divisive.
-
Books in Review.
on Ex Perimeter
Fascinating, encouraging, delightful. Here is honesty, genuineness
of mind and of poetic delivery. Several of these poems are little
masterpieces.
- Louis Dudek
Konyves relays an authentic voice in well-carpentered passages...
short, from the heart epiphanies one finds marked with peculiarly urban
tenderness; back alley kind of poems that cue on the localized imagery of
a Montreal lane, a cemetery, a lover's bed. Konyves has a precise eye for
detail and he strives for meaning in his observations. There is contentment
with the ordinary, tribute to birth and death, to change of landscape.
-
The
Vancouver Sun
The poems in Ex Perimeter are sparse, clear, direct and full of
delicate and precise insight. Whenever I read them I say to myself, "Yes, that is it, exactly." In this life of mine which is too often out of control and beyond reflection,
these poems bring me to a sudden stop. "Pay attention," they say, "to the moment, to experience, to what is."
- Lionel Kearns
on Sleepwalking Among The Camels
Tom Konyves’ strong experimental impulses and wide range of technical
skills produce some remarkably successful poems… both his selections from
Ex Perimeter (1988) and his most recent material in the section Into This
Space represent the work of a skilled poet who is finally coming into his
own. The diversity of this material stands out even to the casual reader.
Konyves displays an extraordinary sensitivity to rhythm…
Allusions to poets… are woven into meditations that are both fresh
and vulnerable. In short, these final fifty pages come close fulfilling
Konyves’ own declared desire to create “a temporary object / through
which a thought flows / searching for a vantage point / to view
the human soul.”
-
Journal of Canadian Poetry
Konyves’ poems are beyond poems, mouthfuls with a surprising aftertaste,
and difficult to explain.
- Rob Mclennan