A small volume that takes on large themes with mixed results.
Finch’s first poetry collection celebrates the lost landscapes of the American countryside and the freedoms of love and faith.
Divided into four sections—“Middle America,” “The Martyrs,” “Loves, New and Lost,” and “America”—this collection succeeds best when its verses focus on the land. The opening poem, “My Wisconsin,” features a “Brilliant blue sky” and a breeze that transports the speaker, a “Weary, rootless traveler.” A sense of movement inheres in word repetition, as in “rolling Dairy State farms,” “rolling cumulus,” and “Sweet Wisconsin rolling through my mind’s content.” More variation in the diction, however, might have heightened readers’ interest in this beloved place. Nostalgia marks many of the poems, as in “I miss the high sky. / I miss the fires burning” from “Note from California.” Nostalgia, always a dangerous trope, garners sympathy for loves lost, but it should also spark skepticism about the perfection of the past. Still, a question posed to an Illinois hilltop (a “lone roll”) and its environs reaches deep: “a soft, warm wind, / Sweet earth scent, and billows of clouds / In a wide prairie sky of youth’s eternal hope. / Where have you gone?” More conventional sentiment appears in the love poems; a flowing dress offers allure and consummation, and readers may well succumb to the pleasures of bliss beneath such a generous shroud. Strange syntax, however, detracts from the book’s resonance; although experimentation can be valuable, it sometimes seems like an editing oversight. However, a late poem, “American Roadside,” achieves the momentum the poet seems to be striving for, despite the frequent absence of anchoring nouns: “Wind the round, deep, delved curve, / Forest swept over, around, dropping slow. / Sure and easy, forever, kept true and cottonwood grow; / Easy the peace that drops and slips, slow and sure….Deep the delved earth runs fast around.” Whoever winds the curve and sweeps the forest must be somehow divine. Although parts of the poem don’t make grammatical sense, readers may be willing to accede to the rightness of its motion.
A small volume that takes on large themes with mixed results.Pub Date: July 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-0507-2
Page Count: 60
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.
Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.
In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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