April 2023 MBR The Poetry Shelf

The Poetry Shelf

Still Love
Jack Powers
https://www.jackpowers13.com
Golden Antelope Press
http://goldenantelope.com
9781952232756, $16.95, PB, 106pp

https://www.amazon.com/Still-Love-Jack-Powers/dp/1952232759

Synopsis: With the publication of "Still Love", poet Jack Powers, in five sets of "broken" sonnets, pulls his readers into and through the lives, decisions, regrets and celebrations of a score of deeply human characters -- himself included.

From teenager Jack, who tries to "rig" the Catholic confessional system, to ancient Bob, who tends his dying Joan gently after 62 years of marriage, we watch and find ourselves rooting for Powers' people. We want his seeds to grow, his buds to blossom, his dying leaves to drift in pleasant breezes. We hear the quiet laughter hiding under the songs. Still, life is complex, and Jack Powers feels that complexity with the sensitivity of a seismometer, records it with the accuracy of a mathematician or painter, and plays it like jazz.

As sonnet rules loosen, lines lengthen, images double back and become symbols, and stories echo other stories.

Last Acts come first in this collection, followed by portraits of relationships which are Still Love: a stoned teen grilling burgers for his family; Alice Neel painting brutally honest self-portraits. Sonnet form runs like tangled wire through Powers' book, perhaps most noticeably in the Still Love pieces, and in the section titled Unruly Love, where form and content collaborate in unruling the expected rules. Noble Suffering poems are case studies testing philosophical notions about the value of suffering with tentative results. Still, the final section of Still Love, aptly titled Surrender, ends with a memory of a young Jack, "floating, surrendering/ to the current, a contented speck of the quick river, white moon, black night."

Critique: Original, deftly crafted, compelling, "Still Love" is one of those collections of verse that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after the book has been finished and set back upon the shelf. The poetry by Jack Powers and comprising "Still Love" will be of special appeal to readers with an interest in poems about marriage family, and aging. Simply stated, "Still Love" is unreservedly recommended for personal, community, and academic library Contemporary American Poetry collections.

Editorial Note: Jack Powers (https://www.jackpowers13.com) is the author of "Everybody's Vaguely Familiar". His poems and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, The Cortland Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. He won the 2015 and 2012 Connecticut River Review Poetry Contests and was a finalist for the 2013 and 2014 RAttle Poetry Prizes. He recently retired from Joel Barlow High School after 38 years of teaching special education, English and math.

Through Rose-Colored Glasses: A Recollection of Memories
Jennifer Neville
https://www.livezenwithjen.com
Independently Published
9798374524826, $24.99, HC, 85pp

https://www.amazon.com/Through-Rose-Colored-Glasses-Recollection-Memories/dp/B0BSXVVDWP

Synopsis: With the publication of "Through Rose-Colored Glasses: A Recollection of Memories", Jennifer Neville provides slim compendium of original prose poetry that reflects back on her life and career as a former professional golfer, and how it all made sense after she fell in and out of love with the man who was ultimately the vice for her to find herself.

In this relatable love story, she also shares some of the teachings she has learned through her spiritual work as a Celebrity Astrologer and Tarot Reader. The result is a distinctive and inherently fascinating kind of memoir about how heartbreak can be a catalyst to manifest and create the life you have always been called to.

Critique: Eloquent, relatable, insightful, reflective, inspiring, thoughtful and thought-provoking, "Through Rose-Colored Glasses: A Recollection of Memories" is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, and academic library Contemporary Women's Poetry collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "Through Rose-Colored Glasses: A Recollection of Memories" is also available in a paperback edition (9798374524345, $15.99) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99).

Editorial Note: Jennifer Neville (https://www.livezenwithjen.com) is a Celebrity Astrologer, Tarot Reader, & Thought Leader. An intuitive being, she shares her gifts with the world in the hope of helping help others develop their own natural talents, remove blockages, and evolve into owning their most powerful selves.

Create Destruction
Ryan A. Kovacs
PHiR Publishing
B0BRNW1JY7, $7.49 ebook

https://www.amazon.com/Create-Destruction-Phase-Book-ebook/dp/B0BRNW1JY7

Create Destruction adopts an unusual format in presenting a novel in verse. It's centered around a crazy doctor hell-bent on harnessing the psychic abilities of a 12-year-old for his own nefarious intentions. While the poetic component of the story may thwart the typical novel readers looking for thrillers in the usual prose format, Ryan A. Kovacs successfully creates a compelling draw both in plot and form which will appeal to more literary-minded readers interested in epic dramas.

The process of explaining destruction as the power of "...the undeniable action/that man chooses - /the very thing he creates" assumes a vivid set of descriptors that follow the bad doctor into moral, ethical, and uncharted territory via the perspective of young Thomas, who participates in a deadly experiment. As the major player representing the doctor's vision, Thomas harbors his own personality, doubts, and struggles. These carry him into revelations about his own evolving abilities and their direction.

Readers who at first might find the verse structure a struggle will be surprised at how intensely Kovacs draws readers into Thomas's perspective, experiences, and evolving sense of purpose under the doctor's hand and his own evolutionary process. The verse reinforces the specter of an ambitious, thought-provoking inspection of responsibility, choice, exploitation, and the talents utilized by a boy who comes to realize he is being employed as a weapon.

Passages prove thought-provoking and impactful than if they had been rendered in prose, neatly drawing readers into Thomas's dilemmas: "Nothing matters because we have lost the meaning of life./Until we understand that once again/we are only ever moving backwards in time." The result is a powerful story that combines the experimental creativeness of literature with the draw of a thriller and the power of fiction to produce an accessible, revealing story that should attract a wide audience.

Ideally, Create Destruction will be profiled not just for its unusual form of a novel in verse, but for the embedded psychological and philosophical discoveries that bring Thomas and his questionable abilities and guidance to life.

Corpse Beneath the Crocus
N.N. Nelson
Atmosphere Press
www.atmospherepress.com
9781639887385, $16.99

https://www.amazon.com/Corpse-Beneath-Crocus-N-N-Nelson/dp/1639887385

Corpse Beneath the Crocus may sound like a murder mystery, but its subject is literary in nature and emotional in content. In detailing the experience of grief, loss, and re-creation, Nelson brings to the table the added value of growth and revelation, injecting a sense of new possibility and beginnings under impossible circumstances. Take 'A Seed' for one example. It compares life to a seed, then metamorphizes to reflect a personal stage of growth: "Sometimes life is like a seed/And sometimes I am the seed The waiting change/The burst of freedom/The power buried beneath turned soil..." 'Lost' is about the "waves of reflection" that follow loss and batter against life itself as newfound coldness results in "Crying the flood/Crying for the beautiful soul/Wandering somewhere in the dark..."

All the works are not succinct expressions. 'Bizarre Mind', for example, explores "Cirque du ridiculous" in considering the meandering pathways of thoughts and hearts challenged by reality and imagination, and the mercurial boundaries that separate them. The heartache of loss and the pain of transformation are captured in a work that chronicles the process of going down the rabbit hole of loss and emerging into a new world, transformed.

Libraries and readers seeking poetry collections that are candid, vivid expressions of this process will find the free verse of Corpse Beneath the Crocus compellingly rich in its study of the emotional peaks and valleys of grief.

Wave Pulse
Michael Zucaro
https://mzucaro.com
Atmosphere Press
www.atmospherepress.com
9781639887064, $24.99 Hardcover/$16.99 Paper

https://www.amazon.com/Wave-Pulse-Michael-Zucaro/dp/1639887067

Wave Pulse is a poetry collection dedicated to representing the waves of life change that pulse through worlds of man and nature alike. Centered in the experiences of humans and environment, each poem is a powerful observation of the banality, focuses, representations, and the "spontaneous patterning" of daily conversations, random events, and underlying connections. Many of these inspections stem from inspirational observations, as in 'FROM A PHOTO OF A HOPI PRIEST BY ADAM CLARK VROMAN': "seedjar spills into night/snake priest jaws gripped/eyes glisten..." One doesn't need a photo to reinforce these visual words - their description and impact are enough.

Others reflect the magnetic attraction of science, as in 'OF COSMOGENESIS', which crafts an evocative physics-laden discourse connecting waves of science with life: "atoms protons electrons/neutrons arc, quarks! What/sparks neurons in our veins?" The flow and pulse of waves of life, light, and insight resonate through free verse designed to contrast the bluster and focus of human affairs with the wider-ranging limitations of and possibilities in nature. Wave Pulse is an energizing collection of inquiries into the models and spirits of man and nature.

Libraries that pursue it for its contemporary literary style will find much to recommend to poetry readers interested in the flux and rhythms of life.

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