Let the Whales Escape by R. W. Haynes

In the tradition of other contemporary modernist sonneteers such as Paul Muldoon, the writing here abounds in subtly-crafted meticulous metered rhyme, where whimsical notions of human behaviour combine with wry self-depreciation. Haynes’s works imply, against an Aristotelean background of comedy and tragedy, a blend of social satire combining realistic scenes with surreal ones so that fantasy often merges with unsentimental social realism. Haynes is both mischievious and romantic, though the former frequently overwhelms the latter, whilst at the same time he often strikes a very sombre note, as indeed in the very title of the work with its allusion to the poetic soul and its plea to the world to acknowledge grandeur over the commonplace.

–Robin Ouzman Hislop. Editor, Poetry Life & Times. Avila. Spain. Summer 2018.

In our fashionably iconoclastic age, where love of freedom and hatred of form mirror each other, and any sonorous and amorphous expectoration, however dimwitted or dissonant, may pass for a poem, it will doubtlessly seem quaint to praise a poet for his mastery of form in his ironically insightful work. Nonetheless, I venture to claim that Robert Haynes‘s Let the Whales Escape is a feast for mind and ear: his poems are mercifully objective and wickedly barbed, but never merely critical of our sophisticated barbarity; their prosodic brilliance is deeply rooted in the tradition of English poetry. In sum, they are poetry at its best.

–Antonio Marino López, Professor of Greek Philosophy, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México — Acatlán