Tag: Poetry

SnowPoems: Book Review

By   Ron Paul Speakes

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Rime ice on trees on the Brocken, in Harz, Germany.  By Andreas Tille.  Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License

 

There is poetry that warms and seduces. That is not the sort of charm you will find in Ron Paul Speakes’ SnowPoems. These poems do not coddle. They cut through consciousness with cool logic. The absence of romanticized embellishment might lead a reader to miss the depth of feeling behind the thought.  Beware.   Feeling will surprise the unsuspecting, with the searing intensity of burning snow, as in

…………………………………..blossom by

Blossom, the alba-like world will flutter

To earth to be gathered in history’s

Urns for the rites that can cut the ties

To Jack’s scattered memory

To Ronnie’s abandoned memory

Speakes explains in his preface that SnowPoems is about the post-WWII era and that the events described are intertwined with snow imagery.  But this poetry is about more than snow, and a specific period in history.  It is about time and human destiny.

The collection is bracketed by a poem at the beginning that references the dawning of the human race, with

Visas to the Levant, to India, China and the

Icy North, to the latent Americas

and another poem at the end that hints of a journey, which continues

…on the slit streets of the Internet…..

Googling, as memory looks at us from the screen

With organs swollen with the longing of antiquity

As they wander through time and space, love and loss, wanderers ponder and ask an oracle

What will become of us? What will become of us?

Snow binds the separate pieces of this collection.   And the pieces are harmonized by another overriding element: sympathy.  It may be a perplexing, even indifferent universe that hosts the human race, but our guide in SnowPoems leads us gently.  His mission is not to describe a destination for our journey.  His goal is to open our eyes and help us see more clearly the path we travel.   In that purpose, Ron Paul Speakes succeeds brilliantly.

I highly recommend Ron Paul Speakes’ SnowPoems.

A. G. Moore     3/5/2017

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Star Strangled Banner: Book Review

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County Waterford Countryside Near Dungarvan, Ireland: Photo by Jorge 1767

By  Dan O’Donnell

When I respond well to a poet’s work I try to understand why. In Dan O’Donnell’s “Star Strangled Banner”, I don’t have to search long for a reason. His poetry resonates with a yearning that echoes in every heart that ever left home. His yearning is not merely for a home but for a past. And in this, his work is universal.

The Irish flavor of Mr. O’Donnell’s work is inescapable. He is “Paddy”, “born from the sod”, working the sod and, finally, dying and being buried “under the sod”. Mr. O’Donnell’s poetry extends to subjects besides his Irish roots. There’s age, and love, hard labor and the burden of corpulence. But it is his Irish-themed poetry that affects me most. Perhaps that’s because my mother-in-law was from Roscommon and spoke often of the hard early years when she would cut peat to burn in the fire. The grand houses she passed on the way to school were remote from the reality of her life.

Mr. O’Donnell’s last poem, “Ireland”, is my favorite and it is a perfect ending piece. “Although I have nearly always been in exile…my mind is free to send me back,” he begins.” He writes, “Every day is long with the stranger.”  However, he continues, clear memory “of a far-off past eases my yearning and helps me to send in the day.”

Though pleasing and well-crafted, his poetry falls short for me in only one respect. He strains at times to find a rhyme. The rhyme is not essential and gives an occasional poem a forced quality. However, this minor point does not detract from the overall quality of his work.

Take the time to read Dan O’Donnell’s “A Star Strangled Banner”.  It would be a hard heart indeed that could not take pleasure in this poetry.

A. G. Moore  1/8/2017

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The Seasons Suite

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By RJ Sobel

Just about everyone can learn to play the piano, but not everyone is a musician. And most of us can write verse, but few of us can boast that we are poets. RJ Sobel can claim that title without reservation.

“The Seasons Suite” comes in four slim volumes. Thematically, the collection could have come in one volume, but the physical separation of the books helps to clarify the mood of each ‘Season’. I wondered, as I opened my first volume, what another person in another place would have chosen. “Winter” seemed right for me, because that is the season nearest to my time in life, and I found the poems in this volume to be the most affecting.

However, there are powerful poems in the three other volumes. “Fall”, for example, offers the jarring, “The Modern Way”: “We spent our toll….For unslakeable consumption…”  And then, “Spring” stirs with, “Business Lunch, Ballad of Malagusta Street”. In this poem, we are manipulated, skillfully, to a certain soft response. A less subtle writer might have overplayed, and tried to wring pathos from this street drama. But Mr. Sobel, in settling for less, gets more. I returned, several times, to read the poem, and will no doubt return again.

Many of the poems in the collection deal with a relationship and its evolution over time. The final poem in “Winter’, entitled “Repose”, draws on the sense of privilege and fragility the aging feel: “I wait with you in quiet astonishment for yet perchance another year.” Time is allotted, whimsically, and the poet marvels that he is among the lucky to survive the years, and, moreover, to share that survival with another.

While the four volumes in “The Seasons Suite” may be viewed as individual chap books, I received them from the author as a box set and it is as a set that I have read them. My inclination is to recommend that the books be considered together because they complement each other.

RJ Sobel’s “The Seasons Suite” is a worthy collection of poetry. I highly recommend it.

A. G. Moore 11/2016

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