A Review of Fret Not by Michael Shindler

Review by Christopher Honey

Michael Shindler, Fret Not. Finishing Line, 2024.

Review by Christopher Honey

Honestly, I wish the poet had made me fret a little more. Many of the poems in Michael Shindler’s first collection, Fret Not, are pleasantly pastoral in the vein of John Clare’s early works, none are offensive, and some readers will take comfort in the mere existence of a new collection of rhyming verse in the midst of a churning sea of contemporary free verse. They are diligently crafted, but they tend to come to a gentle halt where I would prefer them to continue.

I tried to think what these poems resemble. Clare, as I mentioned. Wordsworth, too, as the great English poet of the rural landscape. There is something of the Pre-Raphaelite version of decadence and even Yeats’ fascination with pagan imagery. But Shindler’s instinct is to stop where most of those other poets drive onward. For example, Christina Rossetti’s most famous poem culminates in an orgy of sweet juices and handsy goblins and Wordsworth’s best works take his depictions of rural life past the pastoral into social critique. The poems of Fret Not, metaphorically, end at the point in “Goblin Market” before the sister is cursed by the faerie fruit.

Though the poems invariably rhyme, I would also have liked to see them adhere to a stronger metrical strategy. As an example, let me put forward the first few lines of the penultimate stanza of “We Are Almost”:

          Look, the garden is near, the sun is low;
	  There are the scents of flowers, of a tree
	  On the wind, whispering of faith and woe
	  And though it’s very late now—can you see

The opening line has a headless first foot and a substituted third, but you could argue that this line is saved by the comma acting as a caesura. The second line is iambic, and the third and fourth could be, too, if viewed generously. Segments like this made me think he is aiming for some kind of meter, but it’s not quite there.

One of my mentors told me that rhyme without meter makes the verse jazzy at best and unpleasant and grating at worst. Now, I am much looser in my meter than he would endorse, but I took that lesson, at least, to heart. These poems are not jazzy, and they are saved from that fate worse than death by a sort of consistency that is closer to the isosyllabic lines of something like a bref double, where the similar line lengths rather than metrical feet are determinative.

There’s another poem, “A White Stag,” where the first line of each stanza is a doubling, as in, “A white stag, a white stag” or “A strange clang, a strange clang.” Neither of those lines are particularly metrical, to my eye, but the poems look, at first glance, like they should be metrical, a conspiracy to make me think that I must be reading some kind of metrical verse. It’s why I looked so hard to find something, and while I respect the formal limits to which Shindler did adhere, I would like to see his future poems take that next step. Well-done meter has a rhetorical power that can improve most poems. It’s one reason why we read ALL of Shakespeare’s sonnets, even though we all secretly know (but rarely acknowledge in public, unless we are trying to acquire a certain iconoclastic notoriety) that only between half and a third are truly great; the rest, we read and think to ourselves, well heck, look at this craftsmanship, I mean, this is pretty good, man, right? A lot of effort has been put into the craftsmanship of these poems, but I think they need that additional push forward.

Leaving form aside, let’s return to the content, which often had these touches of pre-Christian paganism which reminded me of Rossetti and Yeats (but which you could also find in Keats or Swinburne or many others, so make whatever comparison you like best). In “My Daughter,” a father asks why his child looks so lonely, why she wears a strange crown, and why she stands by riverbank. She responds with a story about meeting an incarnation of watery death. She falls into a kind of wan love and is given a crown, sees a host of his other brides, and then goes home and waits for the tide to bring him back, which is what she is doing when her father interrogates her. In theory, this is all good, but where’s the sex? Where is the terror? Those other brides–are they dead and foreshadowing her fate? Or are they competitors? I wanted him to be braver and take the risk of going too far or alienating some readers. Here is where I want him to read Goblin Market’s climax and then, when he’s finished, say to him, don’t be afraid to get kinky. But Shindler, in this respect, has a delicate sensibility, perhaps best expressed in another poem, “The Trees,” where he writes, “The winds stoke their lust to love.” Besides expressing a moral view and a dichotomy that I, as a lustfully married man, reject, it is also an interesting inversion because my interpretation has always been that stoking emotions makes them more fiery and passionate—towards lust, rather than away from it. (You can also see from where my mind went, that I tend to want a little more voluptuousness from poetry.)

I’ll make my final point by quoting the entirety of “Pan Is in the Wood.”

          Pan is in the wood
	  And she heard him
	  Though he is dead.

	  There’s evil, good
	  And something grim
	  Life leaves unsaid
	  In the dead god’s hymn.

Pan is dead, but is that good or bad? What happened because she heard him? A lot could be done with this idea. Pan could demand a human sacrifice. He could return paganism to the world. He could ravish her (google some classical images of Pan and you’ll see why I’m going there).

When I first began to compose this review, I saw very quickly it would be mixed, which felt awkward, because poetry is a small world. Right now, it feels very small, because the poet in question lives in the same, smaller-than-you-think town as me. That town is Washington, DC and we are both part of that minority of the city’s population that is, to some degree, professionally engaged in questions of politics and policy (though we operate at different locations along the partisan spectrum). We are also both poets still (always!) learning our trade. It’s natural that a first collection would show room for growth and I hope that he finds some of that growth by harnessing his instinct for rhyme (something I lack) alongside the rhetorical impetus of stricter meter and greater daring.

*Updated 5/31/2025 to correct a transcription error and attendant commentary

Christopher Honey was part of the inaugural cohort of the University of Saint Thomas’s MFA program. His poetry, essays, articles, reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Rumpus, The Building Trades News, Poetry South, and U.S. Catholic. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and daughter.