Communique

In the poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams writes: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." Williams may have been right about that. However, Ed Werstein, in his book Communiqué Poems From The Headlines, tries to prove the converse: that you can get poetry from the news. Werstein's newest collection is sectioned like a newspaper, and the poems cover a variety of topics: national news, weather, sports.