LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Nature, love, melancholy, and the human condition are the themes of these collected verses.

As indicated by the title, Susko considers life from both idyllic and despairing points of view in his debut collection, which comprises four seasonal chapters beginning with “Summer.” Employing images from nature and motifs that recall fairy tales and legends, the verses can be lyrical, bright, and optimistic, often in relation to romantic love, with references to sunshine, laughing, flowers, dew, and bright stars. In other poems, the tone turns gloomy, speaking of fraught existences blasted by such forces as betrayal, mortality, or grief. Each section ends with a poem that gives a nod to the following season. Throughout, the poems speak more of universalized experience than personal, which can make them feel remote; the “you” in the love poems is too idealized to seem like flesh and blood. Another difficulty in the collection is its self-consciously poetic diction. For example, the word choices in “Bidding all to look / Prithee” or “laid upon thy brow” feel inauthentic in the 21st century. Many lines are overwrought: “As though she danced upon the gilded clouds of Heaven,” for example. When the poems show greater restraint, Susko delivers striking images. The memorable phrase “seared chalk,” describing the narrator’s mental blackboard scrawled with unreadable language, captures a sense of harsh dislocation. On other occasions, though, Susko doesn’t think through his images as effectively. In “Enchanted,” for example, a poem describing an adored and ethereal beloved, the speaker declares that “My voice dies as do / screams in pillows,” a metaphor that veers disastrously from the poem’s mood.

Emotional verse that strives too awkwardly for effect.