Imagist, laconic, and traditional modes blend in Frank Tierney´s poetry. Phrasing such as:

Blood-hot
oozing
afternoon.
Stifling
sticky
garbarge street.

Catch the mind and the heart with pictures, sketched with the barest elliptical outline. Yet the sketches suggest with themes fundamental to past poetic expression.
        The themes are many: human and religious love, pride and indifference, loneliness and isolation, nature sour and kind, decay and death, and a despondency close to pessimism. These interact in the poems when considered as a whole. Ideas of hope, nature, and God, on the one hand, and of decay, death, and despair, on the other, weave in and out, creating an alternating pattern of tension and release.
        The thematic pattern is woven in a form remarkably fixed throughout all the poems. The simple words come in normal speech sequence in a basically dimetric line, with the cadence seldom exceeding 2-3 lines, e.g.:

No one noticed the birch seed.
Somehow
        it got planted.

This verse thus moves in staccato, yet the restraint of this rigid fixed form, yields surprising variety and depth.
        Repetition is frequent and effective. In "The Birch," for example, phrases such as "no one knew," "no one cared," "no one thought," recur; and with recurrence adds to the atmosphere and meaning. Some repetitions spread across several poems, e.g., the word "squeeze" which appears in "Newsboy," "City Market," and "Sunday Morning." In "The War and the Boy" a repetition of words such as "hollow" and "empty" similarly reinforce the impact of the whole poem, while the auditory repetition reinforces as it helps create melodic pattern.

        An excerpt from Glenn Clever´s preface to The Birch, Ottawa, September, 1970.

Other Borealis Press titles by Frank Tierney:

Come Climb a Mountain (1970)
Beams of Love (1972)
Fire-Cloud (1972)
The Way it Stands (1974)
The Lilac Tree (1988)
The Old Gold Woman (2000)