James Scully

" . . . the sixth and arguably most astonishing book in what has by now shown itself to be the most intransigently leftist-revolutionary poetic project and career of our generation in the U.S. Scully has taken as his overriding subject the very foulness and complicity of our received notions of truth, beauty, justice and art, and forced us to confront concretely how these notions and their bearers allow themselves to be used..."

"These poems...are savagely successful, even brilliant anti-lyrical deconstructions, fueled by a rage so clean and focussed it seems as cauterizing and irreduceable as fire. Yet of course what makes Scully's fury so effective is precisely the stylistic-rhetorical vehicle [that] appears as a peculiarly flexible and effective fusion of William Carlos Williams' doggedly common American speech and sense of movement with a Brechtian explicitness of impersonal assertion."

"I think it safe to say that some...resistance will inevitably be directed against Scully and his poems themselves, for their crassly explicit outrage, for not being properly artful, personalist, 'real' poetry at all."

from Minnesota Review review of APOLLO HELMET

"James Scully is one of our more courageous and undaunted poets. A good body of his work is political and, as political, it has several precious qualities that cause his poems to shine as if with a layered aura. ...One layer is Scully's remarkable clarity, derived from intellectual argument within the poems. He understands politics as the antagonism between classes, and his poetry belongs to a movement I might call the Revolutionary Tradition, a poetry that cannot be adequately approached with the old standards of Romantic criticism insistent upon the apolitical individualism that sees the classless tree but not the forest on fire. ...He has no reluctance to speak of class politics, while so much political poetry remains centered upon instinctual, individual, moral or purely emotional protest. Scully strips away the masks of confusion and exposes, often with an intellectual wit, irony and power we find so forceful in Brecht, the contradictions in the ruling political arena..."

"A good part of this book is concerned with language used as a mask. Scully's own language is naked, compact in message, often building in the longer pieces toward a haunting impact that leaves us stunned by the unstated implications. The poems, in a quiet way, bother safe accepted assumptions of political values in our country."

From North Dakota Quarterly review of APOLLO HELMET

"James Scully's sixth volume of poetry is one that raises important questions about politics and human nature with an infectious indignation."
--Library Journal

"James Scully writes political poetry and his intention is to arouse. Any reader who emerges from contact with Scully's poetry untainted by unease is likely to have been feigning attention."
--Choice

"Apollo Helmet is a tightly woven volume. The poems flow, moving the reader logically and smoothly from Central America to contemporary poetry. This is a volume to be read in one sitting--its power is like a single blow to the heart."
--The Louisville Courier Journal