An uneven volume of poems.
A debut collection of poetry explores love from all angles.
Poems about unrequited desire, real and imagined lust, steadfast love, and breakups dominate this book of poems. The collection offers solid cultural groundwork, describing an urban environment where everyone hangs out at the “Stardust Skating Ring,” bullets fly like the “Wild Wild West,” Lil Wayne plays, and glasses contain Crown Royal. The author provides insight into his personality in the poem “Sincerely Yours”: “I am the quiet corner / In a room full of noise. / I am the unknown man walking / Down a street full of boys.” He soon segues into love-themed poetry and stays there for the remainder of the volume. Stanzas ooze gratitude to his wife or proffer a laundry list of the little things that demonstrate love. In “Broken Traffic Light,” he compares mixed signals received from a lover with the dangers of driving. Several poems are X-rated erotica, like “Washing away Sin,” which details a crude shower sex fantasy, and “Reintroducing Foreplay,” which proposes how to do just that. A bleaker side of the poet emerges in “Vengeance,” dedicated to “my passionately deadly boo,” in which the author hopes “you die of AIDS.” In his ambitious collection, Sincerely Yours sometimes employs impressive metaphors, such as “my body became a tree, and my feet became roots.” But he leans on clichés in lines like “She was like a rose” and “You are my world / My sun, moon, and stars.” Profanity sometimes mars these pages; most of the familiar curse words are here, from “fuck” to “pussy.” The pornographic language fails to titillate in lines like “Sending you continuous injection / Of my hard erection.” And the woe-is-me attitude toward love (“I know you’ve been abused, / But I am the man / That’s the one being used”) grows a bit tiresome after 100-plus pages.
An uneven volume of poems.Pub Date: July 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-5208-5
Page Count: 140
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Poetry that excites and mystifies in all the best ways.
Goldberg pulls hard truths from simple tropes in this superb collection of verse.
The late child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once wrote that “nothing can be as enriching and satisfying for child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale.” Whether or not Goldberg knows of Bettelheim, the spirit of his line infuses her book, as it’s filled with dwarfs, demons, princesses, and queens. And yet this is not kids’ stuff, for Goldberg takes some of the themes of children’s literature and repurposes them to crafting this blade-thin but lightning-powerful exploration of loss, love, and the life of the mind. Although readers will hear in her work echoes of contemporary poets such as Louise Glück and Jorie Graham, more helpful comparisons are to Lewis Carroll and John Bunyan. It’s Carroll, more than anyone else, who teaches readers that child’s play is seldom childish. From Bunyan, Goldberg borrows an allegorical streak; the former author personifies Faith, Hope, and Ignorance in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the latter births characters named Reason, Passion, and Grief in “The Early Childhood of Grief”: “And from the loins of Reason and Passion / springs Grief, a surly, birdlike boy / who refuses to cry. No gurgling, no babbling, / no scattershot foray into the dense / and dissonant world, choosing instead / to stay mute.” Goldberg deploys her poetic tricks—the assonant “surly, birdlike,” the alliteration in “dense and dissonant”—with thrift and subtlety. As an able, award-winning writer, she has no need to flaunt her gifts, and from the outset, readers will know they’re in the hands of an unpretentious master. Additionally, she’s smart and economical in her use of symbols; favorites include the egg and the flowering plant called love-lies-bleeding. Returning to such images over and over again, she’s content to dig deep into their many meanings, reminding readers anew of the old truth that a rose is never just a rose.
Poetry that excites and mystifies in all the best ways.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-936628-31-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A collection of love poems that never catches fire.
DeShay (Thoughts, Love & Reflection, 2012) returns with another volume of love poetry.
As implied by the title, these are poems of yearning and anticipation, written from the male perspective and concerned with the overpowering effects of love and desire. Poem after poem attempts to express the infatuation and commitment a man feels toward the woman he loves, to match words to actions and actions to emotions. A representative poem begins: “There are times when my imagination consumes / my thoughts and takes me to a very pleasant place; / then there’s where your image transports me with / just a single glance.” The verses also show the other half of the coin as well: DeShay explores at length the complex interactions between men and women, face to face and within society, including ruminations on such unexpected topics as incarceration and voting. Scattered throughout the collection are stock photographs of couples posed romantically along with a few of less optimistic subjects (a pair of hands clutching prison bars, for example). The author also includes, at the bottom of every poem, a speech bubble to invite readers to send their reactions to his work to an email address he provides. The poems are free verse in complete sentences, giving them the appealing quality of dense, miniature essays. Unfortunately, the author generally keeps his language abstract and inexact, rarely allowing readers to hold onto a specific image or physical detail. The resulting verses feel stilted and at odds with the deep emotions they try to express: “You are the focus of my love and my existence / of my direction. I no longer wish to walk alone / but with you by my side. The journey will now / be filled with the purest form of love.” When poems reiterate such familiar ideas outside of a more intimate, immediate context, readers may feel a bit bored. DeShay succeeds in establishing a thoughtful, reflective voice, but it may often fail to hold readers’ interest.
A collection of love poems that never catches fire.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: B00ZPTMRPM
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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