The Girl with Laughing Eyes

Dan Dobson offers a contemporary view of life in short poems that hark back to earlier, traditional approaches to rhyme and scansion. He is realistic about the challenges facing "all the folk who scribble verse" (Calculation, page 2) but likes to recall the advice once given by Ezra Pound in a letter to a younger poet: "If a man writes six good lines he is immortal ... isn't that worth trying for?"