A review of a collecton of Poetry by Dick Lourie

Ghost Radio.  Dick Lourie.  ( Hanging Loose Press.  231 Wyckoff St. Brooklyn, NY 11217) $12. Somerville poet/musician Dick Lourie can blow a mean riff on the saxophone, as well as on the page. Lourie, a long-time Somerville, Mass. resident, and long-time editor for the "Hanging Loose Press" is an accomplished poet, with a number of collections to his credit. His poetry has appeared in : "The Massachussets Review," "Exquisite Corpse," and other literary publications. In "Ghost Train" Lourie deals with the ghosts of his youth, his brushes with mortality, the ying and yang of his relationship with his father, and other aspects of his life. There is much to recommend itself in this collection. In the poem " Forgiving Our Fathers," Lourie defines the polemical relationship many of us have with our Dads, that is as much based on love as on anger:  " Shall we forgive them/ for pushing or leaving for shutting doors/ for speaking only through layers of cloth/ or never speaking or never being silent/ in our age or in theirs or in their death/ saying it to them or not saying it--/ if we forgive our father's what is left?" Alison Lorie writes of Dick Lourie's poetry " Lourie's poems are like sudden, dramatic snapshots of true feeling." Lourie's poetry transcends the artifice of life to get to the maw of the human condition.