Eric Greinke is the author of several books of poetry, social commentary and fiction, and his Selected Poems samples a little more than 30 years of his poetry.

Like Japanese poems in translation, his poems are often simple and unadorned. He makes apt use of poetic techniques, such as meter and slant rhyme, as in the opening lines of "Talent": "We haul our parts around in borrowed trucks, / Call each other up, & fill our cups."

These poems are reminiscent of the often underestimated Rod McKuen: extremely accessible and yet surprisingly deep, like ordinary speech heightened. Take, for example, the beautiful simplicity of "10 Things I Do Every Day":

The lack of pretension is refreshing, as Greinke writes about love without muddying the poem with sentimentality.

Ironically, sentimentality can be the bane of otherwise well-crafted poems, through his frequent use of anthropomorphic imagery. In "Your House," he writes: "The basking plants listen, breathe our conversation. / They thrill at one recognition, relax when smiles break / From bearded faces. They watch the secret cats slink / Lazy paths along the Indian floors."

It's difficult to accomplish anthropomorphic imagery, because it implies the ability to get inside the thoughts of an animal or a flower, forcing human traits on them and registering as fake, frequently overly sentimental.

At the back of the book, Geinke's poems exhibit an interesting transformation, as he engages in psychedelic musings, such as in "Black Milk": "The eyes of Michelangelo's "PIETA" crack, / & black snakes flood the Vatican chambers. // Women give birth to mortar-shells. / Men marry their dogs & cats."

These stream of consciousness poems read like an exercise to free himself, but feel closed to the reader, words that only the poet can understand. Still, when he marries this experimentation with simple language, even his more surreal poems are enjoyable, such as "The Circle":

After thirty years, Eric Greinke has refined his voice, and his poems work best when he is true to that unadorned, genuine diction, resisting adornments that can clutter and cloud a poem.

Presa Press, 2005: ISBN 0-9740868-7-8