Critical Commentary
Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, has this to say about Mark Todd’s poetry: “Todd’s perspective is not the urbanite’s vision of a simpler country life but an exact and exacting account of what rural life entails. His central theme is the inhuman landscape, both the conflict and the concord of rural civilization and wilderness. . . . He sets this confrontation and conversation of human consciousness and the human world in the high mesas and mountains of Colorado, but the drama he depicts is both universal and primal.”
Mike Nobles comments in the Tulsa World that Todd “writes in a manner that chronicles and respects the geographical region. At the same time, his voice is so powerful that he transcends region and speaks to the heart, regardless of where you live.”
And George Sibley, regional author and journalist, writes in Colorado Central Magazine that “Todd is often looking, more or less unapologetically, through the eyes of a newcomer seeking a way to break into the local culture. The perspective, new and place-seeking, seems validated in the quality and honesty of good poetry.”
