Poetry Books

I Want this World offers character and plot. When I read it, I worried that someone would try to make a movie of some of the poems. I have trouble with that. Poems are events and the images that make them up fill this collection. I envision the people with whom I am sharing the moment. The poems help me recognize them - not always as themselves, but in their qualities, motivations, pain, and joy. I see these people as they move throughout the book, sometimes starring in a stanza, a whole poem, or several poems, and in other cases having a supporting role. Some characters exist only as referred-to names. Each of these people lives in my imagination. The houses, roads, towns, rivers, beaches and markets that we visit are real and vital, too. These people continue to live outside the lines of the poem. Their world is mine to understand and visit.

Place is important to Margaret Szumowski. In I Want This World, she shares her travels to Africa, and a past and present Poland. She takes us to the banks of rivers, along hot dirt roads with dusty borders and to the American Southwest. She allows us to BE her for the moments of her poems. The sounds, the sights, the tastes and the rhythms of experience inform her verse, and we get to partake. We eat tomatoes, cabbage, coffee, bagels, pick apples, make applesauce, watch fruit crops ripen, value potatoes in new ways, learn about the birthright of mushroom knowledge.

She gives us the gifts of colors and textures, shows us light everywhere - in Poland, like a verbal Canaletto, in her own experience and in parental memory. Light happens in Africa, in West Texas, on Cape Cod, and in her childhood. She shares sweat, pain, helps us taste foods familiar and foreign. In "The Fish at Vista" beliefs sing throughout, taking us from experience to decision. The chosen path may not be everyone's. In "Take Any Light You Can" she shows us Race Point Beach on Cape Cod telling us about wind and light and strength. In that same poem (in fact, in that same stanza) she talks to her daughter. She reminds us that we move through time and space and light and that movement changes us and keeps us the same.

" the wind at Race Point is so strong,
it can lift a human from the ground,
and I want to be lifted in the wind.
You, too, my dancer.
I love to see you leap as if lifted by the wind."

She goes on to share with her own need for light, advising her daughter;

"One night in childhood I seized a flashlight and was punished.
Take a flashlight, a lantern, take any light you can."

She tells us in "Going Out to Greet Whatever Lives," how that same daughter as a young child caught fireflies, was a safe haven for small living creatures, and, swinging high at night, touched her toes to the moon.

In "Starry Night" we share space in all its connotations, and, again, light.

"stars magnified until we are thousands of years
closer to them than we have ever been before.

The whirling, spinning stars we ached for are
now close enough to burn us.

I did not know the cost,
night at its peak, excruciating light,
all of us humans, awake, awake."

Watch, also, her use of space on the page. Words flow through the pages of I Want this World carefully measured against the beige frame of paper. Again, the need for light - and the needs of light, come through to the reader.

Some poems, like "Under a Hazy Halfmoon," make us, along with Szumowski and her mother, wait for night vision to bring back the body's memory of how things were in childhood. Preparing to go down a remembered path in the dark, we find that;

"By daylight we wandered this forest
from the little tree house overlooking the river-
marsh birds and gold leaves-
it shook with our weight."

The poem on the page sparkles with lightness, with spaces between lines, between stanzas of varying lengths.

The poetry about her father moved me deeply. His travels through memory, his courage in finding something to come to in a new country, his comfort in comparing old to new and seeing value in each are great gifts. He shares with his grandson the joys of the stamp collector. The great thing is promise: "we promised never to lose, never to tear those stamps." There are promises to the reader, to the future and to the past.

Margaret Szumowski gives us the gift of her experience as it blends with her vision. I Want this World is our world and her world in a very short book. We visit throughout time and space with her, with her family and with her imagination.

A science fiction short story I read many years ago postulates a highly specialized world at war, where hospitalized soldiers are in comas. Some soldiers, though catatonic, manage to go to imagined pasts where poorly remembered knowledge combines with dreams. The commanding general wants to know more. An expert suggests that a poet would understand. Sadly, though, in that world, there are no poets left.

Today, perhaps more than ever, our poets need to be protected from this philistine reality. Let's start by preserving Margaret Szumowski.

Read this beautiful book of poems and I think you will know what Wilder means! This is a book both poetic and saintly, a book of vision. Pavel's crafted and gifted words opens eyes and opens hearts. A good, good book.

Pavel's work is lyrical and intensely personal. There are observations of the physical world included in the verse [including a delightful response to the goldfinch in " The Small Musician"] but most of the poems are spiritual landscapes - poems that speak of a lively mind's encounters with guilt, grace, God, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Observations of nature are essentially the beginnings of a spiritual insight so that a toad, a dragonfly, birdsong or storm becomes emblematic of a spiritual life that transcends the physical. In this sense, his work owes much to the nineteenth century Romantics; the same sense of the poet alone in the natural world characteristic of Wordsworth or Gerard Manly Hopkins pervades the poetry of Lion Sun.

Using simple verse forms, Chichikov brings a visionary style to the work. The poet's own voice is a constant feature of the verse. Many poems begin with and specificity the poet conveys. The weakness, perhaps, is that the poet may become baffling in the allusions spun. One sometimes leaves a poem curiously unsatisfied that the power of the message is lost when a crucial element is missed by the reader. There are few contexts in which to fix the poems. The works are largely undated and there is no introduction or biographical information in which to fix the work. Where the poems work well without contexts, they are powerful and winsome.

The spiritual landscapes drawn in the verse are often on the largest canvas. Saints and sinners, giants and angels, creation and redemption figure in the poems. Political features only intrude into the landscapes for their spiritual interest as in the sonnet The Voice.

Chichikov is at his best when he is most tender and personal, when the biggest allegories give way to the fine observation and instress, as Hopkins would have it. My favourite poem in the anthology is called Creation - a sonnet written for his wife Nancy. Like the person to whom it is dedicated, the poem is gentle, subtle and intelligent

The book is stunning in its design with an exquisite typeface and display. The illustrations by Eric Young are lively and attractive. This is a book that will puzzle, charm and inspire and deserves a wider readership than poetry usually commands

She has taken me on many journeys and each time it's as if I'm right there with her, living through her upbringing during the Great Depression, trying in vain to find a way to release her son, trapped in rocks as the fast-approaching tide threatened his life, making me relive them again through her eyes and skillful words.

This is such a charming look back at seventy-plus years of one woman's life and the events and non-events that made her who she is.

I would recommend this book for the young, to let them see how and why we've come so far. I'd recommend it for the old to remind them of where we've been.

I have read it through several times--it's a short read--and have loaned it to all my friends, who loved it too.

spokenwordwoman

T.C. Matthews, Prolific Writers Network...

I have a few favorites. "Breasts" for some reason makes me imagine my lady, looking into the mirror, topless and perhaps noticing me spying her reflection. I gave the poem called "Chocolate" to her and told her that she needed to read that one and think about me. She laughed. It's also one of my favorites though. Other favorites are "Showering,"
"Honeymoon," "Kid," which got a quick laugh out of me, "King,"
"Truth," and "Yesterday." Actually, I could go on and on... My favorites in this collection truly depend on what's happening in my life.

I'd just like to thank Linda Dominique Grosvenor for creating such an insightful collection of poetry. One can tell that she is definitely in tuned and forever in touch with what Love is truly about. This book will forever remain displayed on my coffee table so others can peep it out. I think I better get a second copy, just in case...

Love Lingers is raw and filled with the random thoughts of love told by Linda Dominique Grosvenor. I am not sure when she felt in her heart to express her thoughts through paper and pen but we are blessed that she has.