A reflective book of ambitious, if sometimes-jittery, verse that ranges wide over one poet’s interior landscape.
Hodgon (These Ancient Songs, Sing I, in Chains Now Bound, 2016) offers readers a glimpse into his inventive brain in this poetry collection.
One senses from this book’s title that the author has a lot on his mind. Indeed, he does, and the volume attempts that most basic, yet most challenging, of poetic tasks: putting abstract thought into words. Appropriately, then, the first long piece is titled “Ten Thoughts.” “Thought 5” is subtitled “On Talk”: “Small talk can become a consuming Fire of / misunderstanding / which none know whence it came. / Learn Well to Control It.” Here as elsewhere in this collection, Hodgon moves from reflection to advice, and throughout the book he seems eager to pass along wisdom gathered during a life well-lived. Yet the poet is at his best when he puts his own thinking in conversation with that of other authors, many of whom are religious writers. For example, “In Darkness” engages the Apostle Paul’s great hymn to love in the Bible’s 1 Corinthians. In response, the author writes, “Faith / Love / or Hope? / When is each more stronger than the others? / Are not faith and hope not similar and dissimilar? / Interesting.” If there’s a weakness in Hodgon’s verse, it is his penchant for one-word lines. Certainly, that particular device can be powerful; think of the jarring “Ha!” in the middle of Hamlet’s “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy. Yet even the sharpest knife will dull if one uses it too often, and Hodgon uses one-word lines so frequently that they often destroy his poetry’s flow. For instance, in the final stanza of “Streams of Blood and Tears 4”: “'Blood is thicker than water.. / the cause of unnecessary / revenge, / pain / and / not measured thought / maybe. / An excuse for the perpetual bullying / of / another / family. / Innocence and guilt, / irrelevant.” Longer lines would restore lost rhythm—and save paper, too.
A reflective book of ambitious, if sometimes-jittery, verse that ranges wide over one poet’s interior landscape.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5193-6832-4
Page Count: 72
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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