Full Reviews for Mockingbird (2015)

Mockingbird is a striking debut. It’s ambitious, often funny, and formally adept. Maybe even more importantly, it admits the testimony of the poet’s whole mind: Webster delves into large questions about selfhood, art, and mortality but also finds room in his poetry to take note of a wasp on a windowpane and compare it to “a winged keyhole moving down the glass.” This fine attention, devoted as it is to individual phenomena rather than classification and categories, makes Webster’s poetry rich. An impressive collection.

— James Arthur, author of Charms Against Lightning and The Suicide’s Son

The poems in Mockingbird are deftly chiseled, bright with music, and attentive to both discordant and grace notes. This is due to the observant and empathic nature of Derek Webster's imagination, which allows him to explore estrangement, the richness of the natural world, and to animate various personas. He reminds us language is a magnificent tool; it can order chaos and it can transform memory into compelling art. Mockingbird is a lyrical and memorable debut.

— Eduardo Corral, author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine

Mockingbird reads like the work of an old hand. Webster writes with a light touch, and doesn’t pretend to know more than his poems do: this gives them an unusual capacity for mystery. As an awestricken young painter-friend said, on walking into a gallery full of Jon Claytors, it takes a lot of experience to paint like that. Mockingbird begs, and repays, rereading.

— Luke Hathaway, author of The Affirmations and other works

In Derek Webster’s beautiful debut, Mockingbird, the speaker of its opening poem tells us “…your small life wants to live in you/ despite everyone’s attempts to do it in…” I can’t imagine a more apt or thoughtfully concise salutation, or a better description of the poet’s task and burden. So it was. So it always will be. Webster’s poems take on this soul-making project with real authority, a keen awareness of craft and poetic tradition, and the necessary ambition to be a part of poetry's great conversation over time. The work here owes the most useful sort of debt to Auden and Larkin, while conjuring a consciousness both naturally wry and graced with an emotional clarity and truthfulness that are obviously Webster’s own. I love this book. Mockingbird reminds me of why I sought out poetry in the first place. I suspect it’ll do the same for you.

— Erin Belieu, author (most recently) of Come-Hither Honeycomb, and co-editor with Carl Phillips of Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most