From A. E. Stallings ~ Award-Winning Poet
"In an era when so many poems are sparsely populated with only a first or perhaps a second person, it is refreshing to find poems that include so many genuine other people. And it is also refreshing, when so many poets have little experience outside the ivory tower and the dull suburbs of melancholy, to read a poet who has lived fully in the world. Stanbrough, a former Marine, is most powerful when speaking of war, its mowing and its aftermath. Yet through his technical control, he is able to do so with a cool eye. Even a form as slight as a triolet becomes much graver in his hands, as suddenly in the sixth line we feel something colder than snow blow through the poem: we realize it is the men and women buried in Arlington who are speaking these words:
God?
If you are there, bequeath a gentle snow
to blanket grass and hills and trees and us,
the weary ones who really need to know
if you are there. Bequeath a gentle snow,
and let it drift to comfort us below
these endless marble rows, victorious.
If you are there, bequeath a gentle snow
to blanket grass and hills and trees and us.
Though Howard Nemerov haunts many of these pages in references and epigraphs, here it is Hardy whose influence is most keenly felt. There are many poems in this generous collection that reward rereading."
From Dr. Joseph S. Salemi, CUNY ~ Poet, Author, Critic
"Harvey Stanbrough's new collection, Beyond the Masks, is a work of great power and impressive range. Stanbrough is a poet with a genuine sense of life's intermittent savagery, a writer whose stark snapshots of pain, hunger, warfare, lies, rage, and suicide tear away the masks of our self-deception. And yet there is a fierce hope here as well, a refusal to acquiesce in our human failings. Stanbrough has a clear vision of life's brutality, but he also has the even clearer vision of someone who's passed through that brutality and found compassion."
From Michael J. Bugeja, Director, Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University of Science and Technology
~ Poet and Author of The Art and Craft of Poetry:
"Harvey Stanbrough's new and selected poems, Beyond the Masks, does just that ? it cuts below the surface of things to what is meaningful, or should be meaningful, in relationships ? a broadly defined term. In his poem 'Ants,' for instance, he delves below the surface, literally, to acknowledge that they have their own lines, and humans have theirs, and both share the same difficult existence: 'All are greedy -- selfish, as it seems -- / in this morass of nature and the hunt:/ Nobody wants to be the other's meal.' Stanbrough deals with human relationships -- 'She melts into his waiting arms;/ He smoothes her silken hair' ('The Leading Man Thinks to Strike') -- and superhuman ones, sometimes with a dash of ironic wit, as in this two-liner: 'I know there is a God; I know because/ my ex-wife got Him in the settlement'
('Atheist'). All the while the reader is treated to blank verse, keen attention to line and stanza breaks, and formal works, rhymed and metered."
From Chris Stern, President, Society of Southwestern Authors
"Harvey Stanbrough, in Beyond the Masks, runs a gamut from wild enthusiast to solemn cynic. These are outpourings of life. Harvey's poetry is not for the faint of heart -- it shows his courage and compassion."
