In A Far Allegiance, Roy Scheele offers us poems with the tough elegance of bleached bones. These poems are characterized by taut lines, crisp diction, and electric imagery and a search within each poem for a perfect expressive form-sometimes rhymed, sometimes stanzaic, sometimes blank verse, always with a compelling sense of closure in the way the last line seals the bond between form and meaning. Whether recalling childhood experience in Nebraska, ruminating on the nature of memory, or recalling a scene or work of art, these poems have the integrity of the well-wrought urn.
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Les Whipp, Emeritus Professor of English,
University of Nebraska-Lincoln