Saturday Good Reads: Poetry Five

I’ve read several good works of poetry recently. Three were in e-book form and two in paperback.

Making Adjustments for Life Expectancy: Collected Poems

M.J. Duggan is a British poet who lives in Bristol, and he’s published several works, including  a series of 11 poems entitled Avalon, which focus on industrialization (I reviewed it in 2012). Making Adjustments for Life Expectancy is a volume of Duggan’s collected poems (paperback), and it’s constructed in a very specific way: four chapters of poems reflecting two related themes in each chapter. The themes are love and mortality, youth and politics, nature and modernization, and culture, war, and travel (which might count as three themes).  A personal favorite is “Remembering the British Boozer,” a poem about the British pub and the conversation that happens there.

Poems to Love and the Body, and Seasons of Love

This week, I reviewed Dave Malone’s latest poetry collection, View from the North Ten, over at Tweetspeak Poetry. He’s published two previous collections, and I read both as preparation for reading his latest work.

Poems to Love, and the Body (e-book) is about love and relationships, but the poems also search the depths of relationships, and how much love can often border on obsession.

Seasons of Love (e-book) is also a collection about love and relationships, but the volume is structured by the four seasons, and it’s fascinating how Malone uses the physical seasons to explain the relationships and interactions of lovers.

Of Cars, Dragons and Whimsy: Poems

This is a poetry collection that had another name when I first received it – Techtorals and Other Poems That Rhyme. The author, a lawyer named J. Aloysius, changed the title to Of Cars, Dragons and Whimsy (e-book), and I like the new title better (a “techtoral,” a term invented by the author, is a poem about technology).

Aloysious has included 14 poems in the volume, and then annotated each of them to explain where they came from, what inspired them, and in one case, his puzzlement about the poem’s origin (I have moments like that, too). He says in his introduction that the poems are meant to be read and reread alone and in groups, and I think they work best when read aloud.

Agalliao, Volume 2

Aaron Cornett manages a Facebook page called Agalliao, designed for poets to post and discuss what you might call the “poetry of faith.” For the second time, Aaron has selected poems and published them as Agalliao. The second volume has now been published and is available at Amazon. Aaron was kind enough to include three of my poems in the volume. A total of 65 poems by various poets are included in the volume.

Photograph by Randy Klugiewicz via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.