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
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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