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.
