Three poetic movements, each one valuable and affecting.
A poet bares his soul and eases his troubled mind in this debut collection of verse.
There’s a lot going on in Guest’s volume of poetry, and that’s a good thing. His book is divided into three movements that might roughly be described as the confessional, the observational, and the romantic. The first section, titled “Shards of Truth,” is the rawest, most honest. It features the poem “Plight,” whose opening lines could serve as an epigraph for the movement as a whole: “Words and ideas came to me / in a deafening multitude that could / have frightened the most abhorrent / behemoth you could have conjured up.” The poet’s muse here might be William S. Burroughs, who is similarly blunt and graphic in his explorations of his own mindscape. The second, mellower section is “Portal to the Soul.” For Cicero, the portal to the soul is the eyes, and this movement features many poems highlighting Guest’s visual connection to the world. Often, the author’s eyes fall on wildlife, producing works like “Scurrying”: “A pair of squirrels scurry up a tall tree noiselessly. / The merry couple jump off the branches to / Frolic along the wooden fences under the warm bower.” The poet clearly pays attention to details, and in this piece and elsewhere, he asks us to look with him at the wonders of nature. The final movement is “Love and What Comes Easier.” This is Guest at his most conventional, writing on relationships and romance. A representative poem from this movement is “Radiant Lips, Radiant Hips”: “Your radiant lips / mouth the words to a song / as you sway your hips. / The rhapsody is where you belong.” The great strength of this deeply personal collection is the fact that these three movements are both so distinct and so clearly defined. From them, readers learn that Guest is a poet with real range, and he has the ability to write well in a variety of discrete styles.
Three poetic movements, each one valuable and affecting.Pub Date: April 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71750-889-8
Page Count: 72
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A free-form, often thought-provoking verse confessional in the tradition of Leaves of Grass.
An epic, multipart poetry cycle about the nature of life and the transience of relationships.
James breaks up this debut poetry volume into six long segments: “a few letters,” “a new place,” “a new time,” “in distance, be,” “from ocean, sea” and “her song of legacy.” In each, he presents dozens of blank verse ranging from longer, sonnetlike constructions to much shorter, almost koanlike pronouncements (“is a man now? / is a man ever? / and (far more importantly) / is a man ... at all”). He delivers them all in a direct, clean voice with a bare minimum of standard poetic diction. This is plainspoken verse, often trying to capture very simple, fleeting, common experiences of life: “(just lying there, breathing) / (just lying there, feeling).” The poems frequently evoke the incredible power of literature and art to stir the emotions (“i have read the meditation of aurelius / and the hidden words of machiavelli / i have stood before the paintings of kandinsky / and cried with da vinci’s sketches”). However, the narrator is also a realist; time and again in these poems, actual, lived life pushes aside even the most enjoyable forms of art, as in one telling scene: “sitting at the cafe and reading dumas / a scalding cup falls on a boy / and dumas / be damned to hell.” Throughout, the poetry describes the seductive power of illusions, most often reflected in the discrete moments when they are shattered: “with one toe / he breaks the surface, / and fish swim away.” All along, the narrator observes everything with a storyteller’s sharp eye—“let me tell you / a short, little story / single man / in a single city / at a single point in time”—and a sometimes-urgent need to understand: “what are the four hidden truths? / tell me—and tell me quick.” A recurring hint of deep personal loss fills the final segment, “her song of legacy,” helping to make it the most involving, satisfying section of a collection that can sometimes be rather aphoristic.
A free-form, often thought-provoking verse confessional in the tradition of Leaves of Grass.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4935-0357-5
Page Count: 424
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Inconsistent but valuable for its mythologizing of the Kosovar struggle to exist.
This poetry collection veers between subjects ranging from war in the Balkans to misanthropy at a bar.
Gjoka (Shadows Speak in Riddles, 2011) collects 80 poems, presenting them in their original Albanian and a facing English translation. With such a large pool of verse, it’s no surprise that the content varies. In one moment, Gjoka invokes Homeric myth to tie the violence in Kosovo to a cosmic struggle; soon afterward, he writes of texting an ex. But in these transitions, it’s not the subjects so much as the inconstancy of voice that can be jarring. Gjoka is at his stylistic best when elevating the speaker’s struggles to monumental excess: “My heart hurts tonight for you, dear Albania. / Gods have blessed and cursed you. They’re mean and kind. / Sons you bred forgot your longing, pretty daughters / Who cry for Harmonia / And Cadmus they cry.” By comparison, his vulgar, Bukowski-like voice feels not only less appealing, but less profound: “ ‘I wish, I wish I stole your keys. / You never, never could drive drunk. / But drink if you can drink the seas / If you have close a dear one, / A shoulder you can lean at ease / If you are drunk.’ ” Though these two examples are translations, the latter’s issues are only peppered throughout the book, evidence that the collection could have benefited from some trimming. Nonetheless, rare, powerful creations still shine through, such as the stark image of an empty ballroom in “Back in Time after Death.” Gjoka’s autobiographical ties to Kosovo provide perhaps the strongest of these moments, and in general, the elegiac works here are most effective. A more conscious flow and more careful curation may have boosted this collection to greater heights.
Inconsistent but valuable for its mythologizing of the Kosovar struggle to exist.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1482501995
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
