by Anthony Bane ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2018
A seemingly endless book of nearly identical poems on romantic idealism.
From Bane, a debut collection of emotional love poems.
Over the course of more than 200 pages of poems, arranged alphabetically, the narrator professes enamored feelings for a beloved, expresses gratitude for the love they share, and details the ache of absence. These devotional love poems are written in first-person rhyming quatrains with a hypnotic, rhythmic quality. In an idyllic, magical landscape bordered by waves and home to rainbows and moonbeams, the beloved is compared to many forms: a star, an angel, a missing puzzle piece, a rose: “In the distance is the sunset, / Colored in pastels of red and blue. / This mystery on the horizon / Made me think of loving you.” This bubble of romantic enchantment is a world where dancing is encouraged, memories are always good, and a pot of gold is discovered in every kiss. The love felt by the narrator and the beloved is a fated and forever love. “Fate brought us together / When we never expected to be. / A kiss so tender on a blissful night— / The beginning of you and me,” begins the poem “Forever Us.” In this space, love conquers all and is the key to unlocking new blessings daily. Spirituality also plays a role, and God makes frequent appearances: “The treasure in every day / Is to cherish all that’s real: / The touch of God within us / And His blessings that we feel.” As familiar as this lovey-dovey language will be to anyone who has fallen hard for a seemingly perfect partner, the repetitive nature of the rhyming scheme and the constant recurrence of the same symbols (heaven’s door, rainbows, sunshine, dreams) grow tiresome. These are trite poems with little of the grit and sacrifice and scars inherent in love lived in reality. Excellent physical descriptions—“Your coat is woven with golden threads / From strands of angel’s hair,”—are the highlights of the collection.
A seemingly endless book of nearly identical poems on romantic idealism.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3646-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Courtenay Gray ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2015
A book powered by resentment and anger that will speak to readers who view poetry as expressive rather than contemplative.
This somber debut collection of poems recounts the perils of growing up in modern times.
Gray directs her verses at a younger generation of readers that’s familiar with the angst of growing up in a harsh, unforgiving world. Using allusions to contemporary media, such as the Harry Potter series’ Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the sci-fi TV show Doctor Who, these dark, emotional poems reveal a disturbing portrait of a lovelorn, lonely speaker whose rich imagination provides solace for the cruelty of classmates or former lovers. The verses are often proselike in form, pulling readers into the worlds they describe with long lines, such as these from “The Trade of Heart-Breaking”: “I would carry all those broken hearts, but I already have one beating in my chest and I can’t afford to be the bearer of the broken hearts. // I just step on each one in an attempt to make them evaporate.” Occasionally, though, the speaker’s complaints verge on the banal and clichéd, as in “Twisted Work of Art”: “He’s like a drug that she just keeps going back to. She can’t get him out of her head. She hears him in every song she listens to. She reads him in every book, watches him in every movie, every TV show.” The book’s expressions of anger, unhappiness, and self-hatred can be unsettling; in “Too Fat for My Image,” for example, the speaker ends by saying, “I need to be perfect. / If I’m not perfect, / I’m nothing.” One gets the feeling that the poems in this book were inspired by self-expression and song lyrics rather than by a sustained study of contemporary poetry. However, there are bright spots. “Wide Eyes,” for example, has a cleanness and simplicity of expression that’s reminiscent of e.e. cummings and provide a much-needed break from emotional cries of existential pain and sorrow.
A book powered by resentment and anger that will speak to readers who view poetry as expressive rather than contemplative.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5171-5695-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Nancy Richardson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 27, 2018
A dazzling work by a deeply intuitive writer.
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A debut poetry collection that vividly captures both the dreams and despair of blue-collar America.
The geographic inspiration for Richardson’s masterful book is the industrial heartland of Ohio. The collection is divided into two sections: “The Fire’s Edge,” which focuses predominantly on growing up in the Rust Belt in the mid-20th century, a time of financial instability and decay; and “Untying,” which takes a broader look at uncertainties that increase as one gets older. The first section contains a series of poems that detail the 1970 Kent State University shootings, in which National Guardsmen killed four university students, and their aftermath. By far the most haunting is “Randomness,” which imagines the early-morning ablutions of Sandra Scheuer, one of the students killed: “She slid from her bed on the morning of May 4, / chose the bright red blouse for the occasion / of the day of her death.” “Fainting” captures the feeling of wooziness during the event itself (“Heart / accelerated, free agent of pace and rhythm / beating against my chest wall, room tilting”) and goes on to note that “those lost / unconscious moments exist somewhere / in the cosmos, owed to me by the fact / I have not lived them.” In these claustrophobic, unstable industrial terrains, poems sometimes glimpse beautiful vistas, as in “Youngstown, Ohio 1952”: “the air lifted enough / for me to see the fevered orange flush / of the open hearth on the horizon.” Here, the powerful beauty of a sunset mirrors the infernal glow of the steelworkers’ toil. But Richardson’s painterly use of imagery is but one of her many skills; another is the manner in which poetry and music coexist within her work. In the second section’s “In the Cardiologist’s Office,” Procol Harum’s 1967 song “A Whiter Shade of Pale” filters through waiting-room speakers and wraps around recollections of a traffic accident: “my hands circling his chest turning cartwheels on the floor my head against his back bracing at the place where the car crushed his heart.” This collection will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever pondered the ephemerality of each moment.
A dazzling work by a deeply intuitive writer.Pub Date: July 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63534-605-3
Page Count: 70
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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