Critical Commentary
Commentary by Veronica Patterson on The Visiting Hour
“Poems often arrest and illuminate a brief moment. One strength of “The Visiting Hour” is the way it explores a human encounter with resourcefulness and integrity, moving fluidly between image (“melting away like a thaw . . .”) and statement (“Today, his own hands surprise him . . .”). . . . The poem’s ending captures a moment that both closes and opens the poem. It offers a sense of spring that arises not from flowers but a flowered curtain, in lines that accomplish what poet Stephen Dunn calls “bringing the strange home.” . . . “The Visiting Hour” resonates by creating a magnifying lens through which we see one thread of the human story.”
Commentary by Viktor Tichy on You Know Who You Are
“The subject, shrouded in mystery on first reading, prompts re-reading; prominent heartbeat of the iambic meter throughout the poem which grows on the reader.”
Additional commentary on Lynda La Rocca’s first poetry chapbook In the Shortness of My Days, from review by Martha Quillen, co-founder and co-editor of Colorado Central Magazine (May 1994 Colorado Central Magazine, Salida, Colorado):
“. . . La Rocca is a very competent poet . . . there should be many books to follow—because La Rocca writes exceptionally well.”
