poetry Archives — Mostly Mystery Reviews

06/26/202306/25/2023

The Honey in the Bones

Caroline Mellor‘s The Honey in the Bones is fantastic, exquisite. Her poems hum and sing and whisper in your ear and heart. Mellor partitions her poems in this collection into seasons of the year as well as earthly directions and elements. Rightly so.

Her poetic sense makes much of the earth’s seasons and weather and draws the reader along “soft and slow/as each breath/follows the last,” through the earth’s daily and seasonal tides and cycles. She invites the reader into a comfortable space where you can “tend the ember glow/of your soul’s hearth.” The poem, “Changing Sky, December 31, 2020,” recalls to mind that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Crocuses, birdsong, weather, light, birth—these are all related in Mellor’s vision.

Mellor makes various allusions to gardening regarding many things, including life. “Let my life/be an overgrown/garden:/gloriously messy/and lightly tended/with love.” Yes, mine, too.

In “Imbolc,” Mellor speaks about building bridges: “Give me the silent crescent moon rising over the sea and I will build/you a bridge of light so you can walk across and lie down in it.” To me, Mellor’s poetry is a bridge to a life of serenity and beauty.

The Honey in the Bones is Mellor’s first poetry collection. Living in the United Kingdom, besides being a poet, Mellor is a writer of essays and creative nonfiction. I can hardly wait for her second poetry collection. This first magnificent collection left me a fan.

The Honey in the Bones
by Caroline Mellor
© 2022
Golden Dragonfly Press

10/25/202110/23/2021

Dress Whites – Not What You Think

I received Dress Whites by Richard Gilmore Loftus in the mail from the bookstore last Thursday morning. I finished it on Friday (Oct. 22, 2021). Read it in two days. Usually, I take my time reading poetry collections. But I couldn’t put this one down. Have several new favorite poems from this collection.

From “Jazz” to “Sparrow” to “Come Hither” to “Among the Sonnets,” Loftus’s imagery will surprise and captivate you as it did me. Crisp and elegant, his phrases and poems satisfy and enchant. Loftus effectively emphasizes the connection between nature and personal growth and outlook. Water functions as an ongoing symbol throughout the collection. From the mystery of a “dark river / gurgling through the night” in the “History of Religion” to “the wet in the wind touches her cheek” as a wife waits for her fisherman husband to come home in “Shetland Islands.”

I’ve already read some of the poems more than once or twice. Everything captivates, from the cover art to the last poem, “An Old Orange Boat.” For a debut poetry collection, this is a moving, emotional, superlative offering.

Richard Gilmore Loftus’s poetry is new to me. But, based on this collection, I’ll pick up his other books of poetry. And look forward to being entertained and enlightened by them as well as this assortment of poems did.

For a review of another poetry collection that I’ve enjoyed, check here.

Dress Whites
Richard Gilmore Loftus
© 2018
Self-published

05/26/202005/25/2020

Heartbreak and Love Gone Wrong

Shana Marlayna Chow’s second book of poetry, I Tried to Write Love Poems, is a moving tribute to love and strength. This second book is as solid as her first, Love Gone Savage. (See my review here.) The dedication, “to anyone going through the unrelenting pain of a heart break,” epitomizes a vision of heartbreak and love gone wrong.

Chow extends hope to anyone who “went back to him so fragile” or “didn’t know where to turn.” Strength exudes from lines such as “she pre-planned her escape/and never looked back.” There is a sense that the woman in the poems is split in two. She’s on the inside longing to get free. Or, she’s on the outside looking in at her life before and wondering about how she had accepted the berating and manipulation. “He was manipulation at its finest.”

Occasionally, the poems read more like aphorisms from a complacent counselor than poems that swim amid love and pain. For example,

If you try to understand why someone hurt you,
instead of reacting to the hurt,
you will be healed quicker,
than carrying the anger
in your soul.

Heartbreak and Love Gone Wrong

In the end, Chow’s poems focus on how people must find love, happiness and acceptance within themselves. “Control your happiness by finding it within yourself first.” Attentiveness, making peace with the past, fearlessness, confidence—these things lead through the heartbreak to the sunshine.

We all have both tornadoes and sunshine in all of us.
Surround yourself with those that bring out your sunshine.

02/08/2018

Update to Published Poem

The poem that was supposed to be published in Spring 2017 should finally make its appearance online this Spring. I will post a link once it’s actually live.

Keep your fingers crossed.

12/20/2016

Poem Published

I am pleased to announce that one of my poems, “Beyond Alice,” will be published digitally by Far Off Places in their forthcoming Spring edition, “Trespassers Beware.”

I’ll post again when the issue comes out.

03/02/2013

Sylvia

Sylvia watched the sailboats
outside her window
and heard the carillon
chime an elegy

The remnants of her love
fell around her
like flakes of soot
in the harsh glare of complexity

The sun, loud and clear
glanced of the beauty
of innuendoes
and circled her iron patience

Perhaps, love
in its altered dimensions
will take pity
on her boredom,
exquisite and excessive

And sting her again
with the astringency
of witch hazel.