The book is a dreamer’s search for peace and silence in the mind’s quest for spiritual enlightenment. Lahiri explores transcendence while being compassionate and appreciative of his natural surroundings and daily responsibilities. Silence loses its blind opacity as he delves into its depths and finds a summing up of an entire life.
Tag: poetry
A review of The Under Hum by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White
The poems found within this volume are seamlessly assembled, so much so that the reader cannot detect where Muench and White’s writing both begins and ends. Their style is intermeshed one unto the other, as well as with the inclusion of other writers’ borrowed lines. The outside writers’ lines are italicized for attribution sake, but their syntax and style mirror Muench and White’s dual voices.
A review of Kyivsky Waltz: A Love Story By KS Lack
To accompany Lack on the journey of Kyivsky Waltz is to follow the arcs of two inseparable love stories, to fathom the depths of her passion for another human being and for Ukraine as it existed before the calamities of the present and as it still exists, outside time, in the mind and soul of a gifted poet.
A review of Legato Without a Lisp by Sanjeev Sethi
Legato without a Lisp is an orchestration that ties together various life notes that do not fragment our wholeness or create stoppage points between us and those we interact with. The melody created here has a rippling effect that captures and offers, without lecture or dogma, experience-earned wisdom about how to live with one another in the world at large.
A review of Shechinah at the Art Institute by Irwin Keller
It’s hard to pigeonhole Rabbi Irwin Keller’s collection into a genre, but I’ll call these poems and meditations Creative Non-Fiction, the convenient label of “CNF.” He takes an incident and expands it, rabbinic-style, into a parable, a moral lesson, a life lesson. They are mini-essays. They are sermons.
A review of The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie by Ed McManis
Many of the poems are metapoetic, exploring both the nature of what the poem is doing and can do, while deftly moving through mythology, Biblical texts, dreams and fantasies, while always grounding the people and settings in a casual domesticity. This may seem like a contradiction, but McManis manages the balance and shifts perfectly
A review of Informed by Alison Stone
Alison Stone’s poetry is a sheer delight to read, not just for the cleverness and elegance of her verses or for the insights to which we can all relate, the regret that we all recognize often comes with the territory of memory, but for the infectious positivity her poems ultimately exude.
A review of Dandelion by Heather Swan
This is eloquent language. I find Swan’s syntax convincing and superior to many eco-poets I’ve read throughout the past decade. Her “Crop Duster” carries forth, in poetry, the very concerns Rachel Carson presented in prose in the 1960s and prior. Swan’s “Crop Duster,” (Pg.32-36) written in eight enumerated sections, tells of spraying used to suppress the gypsy moth, of an immune-compromised child, a lump in the girl’s neck.
A review of Steerage by Robert Cooperman
Cooperman’s narrative proceeds with something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, all three children under Big Nathan’s thumb, Rivka and Simon the chorus supplying the agonizing commentary in their strophe and antistrophe. When Big Nathan promotes Moshe from the role of enforcer, beating up the delinquent shopkeepers, to prizefighter, Moshe starts to come into focus as Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
A review of By This Time—Poems by Ian Ganassi
By picking out what was a random unnoticed cultural fragment and placing it before us, the poet is not presenting it as a truth but is assigning it value: this bit is worth paying attention to, he’s telling us, even though doing so yields no clarity and brooks no complacency.