Vulnerable AF by Tarriona Ball

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Written and read by Tarriona "Tank" Ball, this book of hard hitting poetry tells a very personal story of relationships and the attendant hurt, and I enjoyed it a lot. It's very short - only about 40 minutes in audiobook form. The author is talented, with a strong poetic voice and a good reading voice, and her choices of words and phrasing are lively and challenging.

The actual audiobook apparently comes with PDFs of the illustrations from the print book, but my review copy had no such augmentation, so I can't speak to those. The subject matter is relationships, so the 'vulnerable' in the title has a very limited meaning. No prizes for guessing what the 'AF' means! The poet behind this has a slam poetry kinf of a background - not my faovrite, but this isnlt quite that. Some of the couplets might seem a bit off here and there, but you cannot deny the depth of feeling that underlies this. amd the relationship resonance that powers it.

Having said that, I had two issues with the audiobook version that I should mention. The first is that the author, who read this herself (for which I commend her), would often launch into a poem strong and loud, only to tail off into a whisper at the end, so this was an issue in that you'd have to have the volume up to hear the end, but then the start of the next poem was too loud and brassy, or you'd have the start at a comfortable volume only to miss the ending because it was so sotto voce. I listen to audiobooks when driving, and this book is not suited to that at all because of the volume changes, but even when parked I was still uncomfortable with the significant changes in volume.

The other issue I had was with the piano accompaniment, which to me was an annoyance. The author's voice is a fine one and it felt like gilding the lily to add a rather monotonous piano accompaniment to it. I'd rather it was just me and the author. I'm a big advocate of an author reading their own work although I understand that there are often valid reasons why an author will not or cannot do this. It seemed a shame to me, therefore, that I went into this with a joyous 'play Ball!' in my mind only to have my expectations sometimes overshadowed or diminished by the rather tuneless piano playing.

But that could not hide the inherent power, inventiveness, and strength of these words, which is why I consider this a worthy read despite the distractions. I commend it fully. Tank Ball is a poet to watch - and to listen to!

Celestial Music by Tai Sheridan

Rating: WARTY!

While we're on the celestial plane so to speak, here;s a pile of stinking horseshit festering rancid, wishing it was in the sun.

This is an English translation of Buddhist sutras freely translated by the author. Thus we have vacuous lines like: "The earth s[lits open, everything springs forth, let the lamp blow out, welcome infinite happiness" And "Countless truth seekers, sincere and fearless, clarify the diamond body, wishing benefit for all beings" and "The wisdom of spaciousness is the truthful incomparable mysterious light of existence." You would have exactly the same success by writing a computer program to randomly jam dictionary words together or by writing them on a slip of paper and blindly pulling them from a hat.

I have no problem with viewing the planet as a single entity in which we all have a part, but Buddhism seems like cowardice to me. Searching for inner enlightenment while there are people starving, people homeless, people suffering? No amount of chanting is going to fix that. They don't have the option to contemplate their navel. It's sucked back so close to their spine that they can't even see it. They need helping, not chanting.

I guess the hungry at least they have that empty belly in common with Lord Gautama who, let's not forget, abandoned his wife and child. That's not a recommendation to me. It's neither harmony, nor peace and it sure as hell isn't commingling. There's this belief out there, and blind belief is all it is, that if one million children meditate together it can help to change the world, and they do, yet here we are, in an ongoing global racism crisis and a deadly and devastating plague swarming the globe. Thanks meditators! Let's not fool ourselves. What these people do, they do for themselves. It's not selfless; it's selfish, period.

It's appropriate that this book focuses on sutras of emptiness, because that's what it offers: nothing. I can't commend this wisp of a book or the vacuous poetry it contains.

Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
"He said that he would soon be was on his way to Coleorton." 'soon be was' is obviously wrong!

Published for the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, this was a tome in which I felt very much at home because I grew up in and around many of the places mentioned here. I can only publish my review on the 210^thanniversary of the poet's youngest son's birth, a child also named William, but that'll do, right?!

While I'm not much of a fan of poetry despite having published a book of verse and short stories myself, I am interested in the creative lives of artists, and also in life as it was lived by people in more primitive times. This book amply fed my interest on both scores. It was exhaustively researched, but not exhausting to read because the author knew when to share his research and when not to flood the reader in a showy, but unhelpful fashion.

Wordsworth was close friends with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of "Ancyent Marinere" fame, as well as a contemporary of many other well-known writers, such as Robert Southey, who Wordsworth, in later life, succeeded as poet laureate. The biography covers Wordsworth's entire life, his extensive travel, both in walking tours of England, and Scotland, and in his travels in Europe.

I had no idea he'd been such a rebel in his time, and especially no idea that the British government sent a spy to keep an eye on this radical - something which Wordsworth evidently found amusing. It also covers his close relationship with his sister Dorothy, who herself was no slouch with a pen. She's not the only female writer mentioned and some of those mentioned in passing in this book were interesting enough to me that I'm looking to find some of their material to read.

Call me mercenary, but personally I would have liked to have learned a little more about how Wordsworth paid his way in life. He received a substantial settlement on debt owed his family from the First Earl of Lonsdale, to the tune of some £4,000 which was a substantial sum back then. It ain't exactly chicken feed now! This money permitted Wordsworth to marry, but it didn't seem like it was enough of itself to keep him going throughout his life and permit raising several children.

He earned some money from his writing, but not as much as you might think, not when we learn for example, that when "The Lyrical Ballads was published by Longman and company in May 1807, in an edition of 1,000 copies, 230 of them were remaindered." He obviously did all right for himself, but he was hardly a sell-out artist. In passing, Lonsdale was of the lineage which lent its name to the boxing award - commonly known as the Lonsdale Belt, although it was the fifth Earl - much later in the lineage, who inaugurated the belt, not the one who paid Wordsworth.

Wordsworth did publish other work of course, and later in life he had official 'jobs' to do, which undoubtedly helped him financially, even as his writing star seemed to fade, but I found myself periodically wondering throughout my reading of this, how he could afford to keep moving his household, and to travel so much in Europe. How did he finance it?! Maybe he was very frugal?

That complaint aside though, it was fascinating to read of his adventures in France right in the midst of the revolution, and of his desire to be a journalist until a journalist friend of his was decapitated! He also spent time in Germany, and he engaged in a lot of walking tours in Britain. These stimulated his creative juices and inspired and fed a lot of his poems.

I was rather disturbed to read that "Back in 1803, William had left Mary, recuperating well from the birth of their first child, and gone on a Scottish tour in the company of Dorothy and Coleridge." That seems a bit callous, especially in an era where children died young quite often. Three of Wordsworth's children predeceased he and his wife, and two of those were very young when they died. I guess parental attitudes were different back then, with the female of the pair very much expected to stay home and care for the children while the male did whatever he wanted. I'd confess I'd hoped for more from Wordsworth!

But these are minor questions that crossed my warped and fervid mind as I read this. Overall, I was quite thrilled with it and enjoyed it very much. I commend it as a worthy read.

Night Shift by Debi Gliori

Rating: WORTHY!

From Scots author Debi Gliori comes this short (~30 pages), illustrated, small-format book which has the aim of conveying what a life of depression feels like on the inside. The approach to it is to convey the feeling in graphic images of, for example, dragons, supported by brief and pithy verse. This is the kind of book you have to go with from the off and take it as you find it rather than try to analyze it, and I felt that it works well, and it works for both grown-ups and children. I commend it as a worthy read.

Haiku World by Vanessa, Kuo Kenih

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I wasn't impressed by this book at all. I don't know who wrote it. Net Galley lists the author as "Vanessa" whereas clearly on the book cover, where the author's name is to be expected, there was 'Kuo Kenih'. I have no idea what that means. Worse than this, there was nothing to it. Naturally with poetry, the tendency is to go into it expecting less, but hoping for more. This was less and less.

There was no actual copyright notice, just this phrase: Posting of any material from this book with appropriate credit is forbidden. I guess that means a long as it's posted without credit, you're fine? That's why I did not credit the quote I just listed in this paragraph. I don't know if this was translated from Japanese. Perhaps it was, but there is no translator credit, unless it was written by Kuo Kenih and translated by Vanessa. or vice-versa.

I wondered about the translation because the triplets here aren't even haiku in the traditional sense. They're based on syllables whereas haiku are not, which tends to negate the translation hypothesis. Haiku are based on sounds, which people equate to syllables in other languages, but that's not strictly accurate. Haiku are also supposed to be about nature, which some of these actually are. Traditions change though, and modern haiku have strayed from the original style. This is to be expected, but if there is one thing from which it ought not to stray, it's elegance and meaning.

For me that's where the problem lay in this book, and in very nearly every haiku I read. I gave up about fifty percent in. They felt flat and meaningless. There was nothing deep about them and very little of elegance. There was nothing offered up; nothing sacrificed. There was no 'cut' between the overture and the finale, to perk up the mind. I was almost universally disappointed, and I can't quote to you the one which I did like, because it's forbidden now that I've attributed this work to its author. Or its other author. Sorry! I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Glimmerglass Girl by Holly Lyn Walrath

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

As I mentioned in the post for the other volume of poetry I reviewed today, I feel something of an obligation to read a book of poetry now and then because I published one myself. Poetry is a tough sell these days and is in fact a dying art in terms of publishing. I actually find that strange, because in this modern world of short attention spans and sound bites, you would think that poetry would do well. On the other hand, sound-bites tend to be the lowest common denominator, which is the very antithesis of good poetry, so maybe that's why it doesn't do so well?!

This does makes me wonder though, if poetry has become too disconnected from real life for its own good. It used to be that poetry rhymed and while as a kid I never did quite get the non-rhyming ones, as an adult they made a lot more sense. I'm not advocating for rhyming poems here although I personally have no problem with them. For some reason - the leading suspect is disdain - they're out of fashion these days in poetry books, but are an area of endeavor that seems to have been usurped not by greeting cards, but by popular music these days. Perhaps, when all is said and done, this is what rap music is? I don't know! I'm not a fan of rap, but it does seem to be the natural if belated heir to the beat generation of the forties and fifties.

I would definitely advocate for poetry that's more accessible, and especially that's accessible to children, who are actually being spoiled by growing-up learning only that a poem has to rhyme line for line. A poem can rhyme in many more senses than the last word in the line: it can rhyme in sense, in meaning, in feeling and in other ways. This is the heart of poetry, and it's something children do not learn. They're taught exactly the opposite with nursery rhymes and rhyming children's picture books, which makes it hardly a surprise that when those children become adults, they don't pay poetry much mind, associated with childhood things and put away as it evidently is.

This particular volume was a pleasure to read, although it seemed a little odd to read in the front of the book that it was a work of fiction! It was the standard disclaimer, but when related to a book of poetry that's hopefully pulled from the author's heart and soul, what can that mean exactly? I wonder!

The first poem, "Espejitos" (Mirrors - that's what living in Texas will get you!) was highly topical and had #MeToo written all over it; not literally, but in the words of Doctor Who, "Give me a crayon and some time...." The book has a butterfly image superimposed on the text, appropriately a glass-winged butterfly, but I have to say that parts of the image were so dark that they obscured the text. I'm not sure if this was intentional. If so it was an interesting effect: a poem about women being undervalued, effaced, unseen, retired to a haunting mirror image, abused, and then being further abused by something as delicate as a butterfly?

There were other poems accompanied by images, but none of those seemed to interfere with the text like this first one did, except perhaps for "Wind-up Girl", which featured a picture of a ballerina collapsed almost like a tortoise retreated into a shell. The picture was dark and the text white, but some of it disappeared into the tutu it must be reported! Maybe this was the #MeTutu movement? The poem and image very-well recalled the dancing girl in a music box and how captive she is.

I really liked several of these poems, in particular "In rejoice of Kindred Grief", "Two Young Wives", and "She learns How to Disappear." I particularly liked "Woman" which in its succeeding line echoing the previous reminded me so much of some of my own work and harks back to what I said above about rhyming in ways other than matching the last words of each line. I will quote a small section of this to illustrate:

I split myself apart
parting seas
seaward bound prow
prowling wood hewn rough
rough as the chill of
children...

There's no rhyme here in words as such, but there is rhythm in how the first word of the next line catches the last word of the previous one and reinterprets it, continuing the poem. This is very much to my taste and something I like to bring to prose when I can, if I can. It's especially apparent in my parodies where I feel no need to constrain myself, so for me, it was a real joy to read it here and see how well done it was.

The book is quite short, only some forty-six pages of which only thirty or so are poems, but it says a lot in that small space - itself evoking the small space some women are forced to occupy in this male-dominant world, so even that worked. I can't claim that I loved everything in the book by any means, but poetry is like a box of chocolates...no, I won't go there! Suffice to say there was more enough to love, and I commend this as a highly worthy read, full of heart and meaning.

Chemically Coated Personalities by Justin Rawdon Lipscomb

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm not a huge fan of poetry, but I have a volume of it out there myself, so I'd be a churl were I not to take a look at the works of others once in a while and commend ones I found appealing. Unfortunately I cannot do that with this volume. I read it through and did not feel a single connection to anything in it. The biggest problem was that I could not for the life of me figure out what the poems were really about, what they meant, what the author was trying to say, despite the titles, which often seemed at odds with the content to me.

Poetry is, it would seem, a dying art form, at least in English-speaking countries. As the Washington Post reported in April of 2015 (which was national poetry month), the number of Americans who read a work of poetry in the previous year had declined by more than half from a decade or two before, and it had been only sixteen percent to begin with. It was less popular than going to a museum; than going to a jazz concert; than crocheting. A survey in Australia at roughly the same time evidenced a similar lack of interest. It's a tough sell, and while some might decry that as a 'bad thing' it's no more than a reflection of people's tastes, which change, of course.

This is why the content of a poem matters and why it needs to appeal. This doesn't mean we should all start writing Hallmark verse by any means, but the more personal and obscure a poem is, the harder it's going to be to find an audience. Another problem is the current era's lack of attention span. We've been trained to eat in sound bites and that's an unsound philosophy because it inevitably comes back to bite us. Poetry can lend itself to this, but it often refuses to yield.

My issues with this one were two-fold: firstly that it felt really pretentious - like the author was playing at being poetic rather than actually being poetic; like it came far more from the mind than the heart, and secondly that the poems were consistently whiny and maudlin. There was nothing uplifting here, and it was a depressing read. This was not helped by the fact that most of the time I had no idea what this author was waxing on about. I really didn't. Nor did I see a connection between the poem's title and the content of the poem, not that this seemed important to me but it was one more thing.

If the purpose of poetry is to invoke feeling in another and lure them into seeing the world through the poet's eye, then this was a fail for me, because it didn't evoke anything but confusion. I felt this from poem one, and throughout the book. It never changed and so it never improved. After about two-thirds of the volume, I gave up because I had got nothing from this at all save irritation with what too often seemed to me to be a litany of self-pity.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this book was that the poems varied very little - similar length, similar meter, similar cadence, similar topic! It very quickly became very routine and very monotonous to read, and every one of the poems seemed to exude an aura of malcontent: dissatisfaction with people and with life. It was an irritating read where it wasn't rather depressing, and I didn't feel remotely elevated by this art; quite the contrary. I could not connect with it or even understand what the author was trying to say most of the time.

As an example, the very first poem, titled "Addiction, but No Quarter" began this process with the first line "The wood placed in my hand makes me different" but then the rest of the poem never came back to this so I had no idea what this meant. What was the wood? What was happening? Was it a baseball bat? Was it a stake designed to be driven through a vampires heart? Was it a cross? A golf club? Was it a metaphor for a forest? Or an erection? None of the above? I have no idea because the rest of the poem failed to offer any illumination whatsoever! In fact it only made things more obscure with lines like "Silence is too loud to hold the sound of nothing" and "Veins carry the liquid pain that holds us in an unworthy dominion of ourselves".

I realized as I read that poem, that no line was really connected with any other line. It was merely a series of disjointed statements which were so obscure that all meaning (I assume there was meaning, at least for the author) was lost for me. There may well have been a connection in the writer's mind, but if it fails to reach the reader, then what's the point? This is a problem inherent in writing poetry in that it is so very personal that there's a very real, grave, and sad risk that no one else will get it. Certainly, and especially if the author denies the reader some sort of 'in', it will mean far less to others than it meant to the author, and that was the problem I had with this entire collection of poems.

I'm sure they're very personal and have real meaning to the author, but that doesn't necessarily migrate to the reader, so while I wish the author all the best in his poetical and musical career, I cannot commend this volume as a worthy read.

They say Blue by Jillian Tamaki

Rating: WORTHY!

I commend this book! Reading it was like reading a series of haikus. The theme is color and it meanders all over the world and the seasons, starting with the blue sky and ocean in summer, and drifting through the seasons. It was beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated and I fell completely in love with it. I enjoyed Jillian Tamaki's drawings in Gertie's Leap to Greatness by Kate Beasley, which I favorably reviewed back in June of 2016. It's nice to see her out on her own. I recommend this nook, even if you don't have children!

Poetry for Kids: William Shakespeare by Marguerite Tassi, Mercè López

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy, for which to the publisher I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks!

This book was a little bit different from what I expected, but there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. For me, I thought it might be Shakespeare's words altered somewhat to facilitate children's reading, but in fact the text was untouched. What editor Marguerite Tassi (on the faculty of University of Nebraska-Kearney, and much published on many aspects of Shakespeare's work) did was to choose the pieces, include them unaltered in any way, but to add a short glossary after each to explain some of the more obscure or more readily misunderstood terms. Language use and meaning changes significantly in four hundred years!

There is also included some notes at the end on "What William was thinking," and an index. I read this on an iPad and what I would have liked to have seen was a means to get back to the contents page from a given excerpt. From that screen you can get to any item with a tap, but once you've shuffled off this mortal contents, you can't get back except by sliding the bar at the bottom of the page which oft trigger'd Apple's pop-up bar, and it was annoying. To link or not to link, that is the question!

Talented and Spanish-born artist Mercè López contributed illustrations for many of the excerpts. The illustrations, well-aimed at children, served to leaven what otherwise would have been a landscape solely of text and perhaps, because of that, a tragically undiscover'd country. It's a pity the editor doesn't hail from the same place as the illustrator, because then it could have been billed as 'Two Gentlewomen of Barcelona'. But it was not to be!

There are over thirty selections here, so there is no arguing over what was the most unkindest cut of all, because if they are mark'd to read, they are enough. Let us not wish for one choice more; the fewer options, the greater share of honour each derives! The excerpts were a fine selection in my amateur opinion, and made for some great reading if you're at all a fan of Shakespeare. The choice selection (There's a double meaning in that!) is as follows:

• All the World’s a Stage from As You Like It
• O, for a Muse of Fire from Henry V
• We Were, Fair Queen from The Winter’s Tale
• Over Hill, Over Dale from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Round About the Cauldron Go from Macbeth
• Under the Greenwood Tree from As You Like It
• Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? (sonnet)
• O Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore Art Thou Romeo? from Romeo and Juliet
• Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent from Richard III
• If Music Be the Food of Love from Twelfth Night
• How Sweet the Moonlight Sleeps Upon this Bank! from The Merchant of Venice
• O, She Doth Teach the Torches to Burn Bright! from Romeo and Juliet
• O Mistress Mine, Where Are You Roaming? from Twelfth Night
• What Light Is Light, if Silvia Be Not Seen? from The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• But Soft, What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks? from Romeo and Juliet
• My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun (sonnet)
• The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds (sonnet)
• Cowards Die Many Times Before Their Deaths from Julius Caesar
• Once More Unto the Breach from Henry V
• All Furnish’d, All in Arms from Henry IV, Part 1
• The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d from The Merchant of Venice
• Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears from Julius Caesar
• All That Glitters Is Not Gold from The Merchant of Venice
• That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold (sonnet)
• To Be, or Not to Be, That Is the Question from Hamlet
• Blow, Winds, and Crack Your Cheeks! from King Lear
• To-morrow, and To-morrow, and To-morrow from Macbeth
• Why, Man, He Doth Bestride the Narrow World from Julius Caesar
• If We Shadows Have Offended from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Our Revels Now Are Ended from The Tempest

But soft, what a great way to get kids involved, especially if they can read and you can get them to get all dramatic and really speak these words from the heart with spirit and energy. O for a muse of fire! Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious reading by this daughter of Baltimore! I recommend this.

Salt and Oil, Blood and Clay by Jennifer Bresnick

Rating: WORTHY!

This is "A collection of short stories, poems, and vignettes that use fantasy and the harsh realities of ordinary life to explore the impact of solitude, sorrow, hope, and longing on how we see and believe in the world." I don't think that blurb does this justice. This is short, but it was quite engaging. I liked how it hung together, and even though I didn't 'get' everything, and didn't like some things, overall I considered it a very worthy read.

I loved that the author isn't afraid to make her poetry rhyme. I'm not one of those people who thinks poetry should be "just like in the Hallmark cards' but neither do I think rhyming poetry is a dirty word. Or more to the point, a set of dirty words! I think poetry needs to have rhythm, meaning, and yes, rhyme, but you can rhyme with meaning and sentiment instead of literally with words. Far too much poetry these days is pretentious prose arbitrarily broken into random clauses. Not with this author, who writes so well that you can feel the emotion coming through those words straight into your heart. That's exactly what poetry should be.

The short stories were quirky and engaging, and in some cases felt like they were unfinished - or were the beginning of something longer, which the author abandoned, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing to get from a story. Some of those were intriguing. Life is unfinished until it's too late; then there's nothing we can do about it! We've left it to others to finish what we started, so my advice is to get it done while you can, and this author brings that and more. I recommend this.

Courage: Daring Poems For Gutsy Girls by Various Authors

Rating: WARTY!

I must say up front that i am not a big poetry fan despite having published a book of poetry and prose (Poem y Granite - the title says it all!) myself. Poetry is like all art forms: a very personal thing, and I'm forced to conclude that it's especially personal to the author of it, and less so to everyone else!

On top of that, this book isn't aimed at me. Well maybe it's aimed at half of me, since I do have one X chromosome, but I suspect it's intended for those carrying at least two such chromosomes. Oh yes, it's possible to have more than two, but it's usually not a good idea. Male chauvinists might take some pleasure in the knowledge that for each extra X you have, your IQ drops by about fifteen points, but this is only in males, so evidently we can't handle the X! When females have an extra X the IQ drops only by ten points, so that ought to set the record straight!

It seems odd to say I was disappointed in this, because I wasn't sure what to expect from it. I got less than I expected, whatever that expectation was though, which meant it was a disappointment for me. I think that my first problem was that these poems didn't feel very much like poetry to me. Most of them were nothing more than prose split arbitrarily into odd line segments. We've all done that: pretentiously split up some (to us) deep-sounding prose and called it a poem, but it doesn't make it one.

And no, I'm not one of these people who believes that if it doesn't have an alternate rhyme scheme like a Hallmark card or a pop song, then it's not a poem. I do like rhyming poems, but I appreciate other kinds of poetry too, if it seems poetic! There are different ways of making a poem. It can be done by rhyming words, or by rhyming ideas or thought, or meaning, or by making the poem rhythmic in some way. It's that old truth: I may not know much about art, but I know what I like, or something along those lines.

Again, it's a personal thing, but to me, most of this stuff was not poetic. Maybe that's on me for not being a woman (or a girl in this case)! Maybe there;s a secret girl code in here that guys just don't get, but whatever it was, I think that accounts for the bulk of my disappointment. I didn't feel elevated or educated by it. I didn't feel I had any insight I had not had before. One poem, for example, bore more resemblance to a shopping list than ever it did to poetry. Others were simply women evidently getting bad stuff out of their system, which is fine. No on says poetry is required to be upbeat and perky (no one who knows anything anyway), but this simply did not feel poetic.

So while others may get different mileage out of this - in fact I hope they do - I didn't get very much out of it at all, so I can't recommend it.

If Bees Are Few by Various Writers

Rating: WORTHY!

I have to say up front that I am not a big fan of poetry. Too much of it seems way too pretentious to me, but I am a big fan of bees. The aim of this book was to bring together "a hive of bee poems", with the profits from it going to the University of Minnesota Bee Lab. So, if you don't want to read the book, at least consider sending some money to the lab! Maybe they'll send you a free beard of bees!

No, they won't - the bees would just die without the queen, and if they included a queen, she would probably die from being so exposed! This is how vulnerable bees are, and whatever is causing Colony Collapse Disorder isn't helping. If the bees go, we're screwed for a host of food plants, and gorgeous flowers and trees which we can only enjoy if the bees pollinate them. Besides, bees are cute!

CCD has affected a lot of nations: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA, to name a few. Unfortunately these nations are not all well represented in this book! France, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland have no representation as far as I can tell, and continents like South America and Africa not at all or hardly at all. There seems to be a strong focus on Minnesota (about 20% of the writers are from there or live there), and around 80% of the writers are from or resident in the USA. That said, there is some representation from a wide variety of nations, if only to the tune of one or two writers each.

The title, If Bees are Few comes from Emily Dickinson's 1755 poem To Make a Prairie, and though I am not a fan of hers, her poems were nonetheless among the best here. There is a preface and an introduction which I skipped. I never read those things, but I did read the afterword by Marla Spivak which talked about the whole purpose of the book. She's well-worth listening to.

The poems are from people both living and not, and there were some sterling names among those who have gone to that great beehive in the sky: Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Devereaux, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, DH Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, and William Shakespeare, Alfred Tennyson, Vergil, Walt Whitman, and William Butler Yeats. Let's face it, whether you're a fan of poetry or not, these contributors are no lightweights! The variety of poetry is remarkable. Some are long, some short, some are like traditional poems, some not, and some are more like short stories than poems. Some are serious, some amusing, some descriptive, some truly poetic, if not obscure! Some are solely about bees, others have bees make cameos, just buzzing in and out. There is something for everyone, though, which I really liked.

I found myself preferring the older poems but there were some more recent ones that had a good voice, too. All in all, it made for an entertaining read even for someone like me. And it's for a really good cause. It's for all of these reasons that I recommend this book.

Salad Anniversary by Machi Tawara

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Title: Salad Anniversary
Author: Machi Tawara
Publisher: Steerforth
Rating: WARTY!

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Machi Tawara is a young Japanese poet who single-handedy revived the ancient tanka style of poetry in Japan, but for me it just tanked. The poetry left me completely flat. It was nothing uplifting or edifying. It wasn't educational or moving. All it consists of is Tawara pining over a lost love - which she personally never had to begin with - or talking about her everyday activities which frankly, was boring.

For this she became a superstar poet in Japan, selling some two to three million copies of the book. I guess you had to be there. What appeals to the Japanese isn't necessarily what appeals to we westerners, nor vice-versa, and while I am sure that Juliet Winters Carpenter gave the translation her best shot, the fact is that you can't translate Japanese to English and have the idea behind Tanka remain true. If you did, the English version would not be in a series of triplets, as it appears in the iPad translation, or in an apparently random mix of couplets and others as it is in the kindle, but printed vertically down the page, which in English would be a tough read. Clearly no thought whatsoever has been expended on the ebook versions.

Salad Anniversary begins with two blank pages in the iPad version, and the title with a capital S towards the end of Anniversary in the Kindle version. This tells me that as little thought went into the ebook as went into the print version. Given the rise of ebooks the publisher might want to give some thought to how they offer their wares.

Here's the list of poem titles:

• August Morning
• Baseball Game
• Morning Necktie
• I Am the Wind
• Summertime Ship
• Wake-up Call
• Hashimoto High School
• Pretending to Wait for Someone
• Salad Anniversary
• Twilight Alley
• My Bisymmetrical Self
• So, Good Luck
• Jazz Concert
• Backstreet Cat
• Always American

You can see from this alone that there's nothing Earth-shattering on offer, but this would have been fine had what was offered actually delivered something of value. For me, it didn't. Here are some short unconnected samples so you can judge a little bit, at least, for yourself. Note that these are taken out of context, but I saw very little flowing from one triplet to the next anyway.

On Kujukuri Beach
taking picture after picture
I may only throw away

Sunday morning
in sandals, we set off together
to shop for bread and beer

I boil three chestnuts
to make an autumn for one-
remembering the far-off sea, and you

Buy myself a pair of slippers
yellow as spring flowers
now that I love here

There are three problems. First of all, the poetry doesn't speak or call out to me. Instead, it whines with self pity. I kept wondering if the author rent her clothing or wore sackcloth and put ashes in her hair before she sat down to write it. Second, it's impossible, as I mentioned earlier, to properly represent the poetry in English in the way it would appear in Japanese. Third, you cannot duplicate the cadence adequately in English and still maintain the wording or meaning which the original author intended.

I have to wonder if the choice to migrate this to English was truly done with an honest desire to share some potentially interesting Asian poetry with the west, or if it was simply done because the author scored a hit in Japan and there was potentially money to be made in the west? Either way I can't recommend this.

Contemporary Passion by RM Romarney

Title: Contemporary Passion
Author: RM Romarney
Publisher: Vivid Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

I don't usually review poetry because I tend to find very little that speaks to me or impresses me in any relatable way, but I have to admit that this one has what it takes and turned out to be entertaining. It's a 38-page poem (in my ebook ARC) set in modern times, but played out as religious passion play. Actually, to me, it seemed more like a musical, or like that old Queen song, Bohemian Rhapsody, and I enjoyed it a lot despite its religious theme.

It features a group of young, passionate, and virile artists in process of recording an album of music, and having some serious relationship issues along the way - and I mean serious! And for once, I get a book with a truly appropriate cover! Yeay!

I think this poem made an impression on me because in some ways it reminds me of some of my own, such as published in Poem y Granite, but I've never written one as long as his! To reference my own work might seem self-serving or self-absorbed, but isn't that how we all are with poetry? It has to reach us, doesn't it? It has to say something to each of us personally, and speak in a voice we understand - one to which we can easily relate, otherwise it's meaningless, obscure, pointless, and boring. Contemporary Passion was none of the above, which is why it appealed to me. It was joyful and passionate, and had a life of its own, and I salute the author of it.