HLP Books in Review
Breakwater Rock
Reviewing Bruce Lawder’s collection Breakwater Rock, Glynn Young at Tweetspeak Poetry recounts how the act of remembering a place can stir a sense of loss and dislocation on revisiting it. This, he writes, is what Lawder discovered on a hometown visit: “[t]he place is still there but [. . .] most things have changed; even those that seem the same aren’t quite the way you remember them.” It’s a feeling readers might find familiar, Young suggests, and, citing Lawder’s poem “Lamentation,” come to mourn. “Remembering a place and your childhood with it and mourning the loss of the familiar [are] about understanding and acceptance. As Breakwater Rock so amply shows, you, too, will one day pass, becoming a memory, a family story, a retelling of an old joke, a name and date on a genealogy chart, a fallen leaf carried by the river.”
Destinations
At Tweetspeak Poetry, Glynn Young’s review of Michael Favala Goldman’s ninth collection of poetry, Destinations, highlights the poet’s “unique voice” and “use of simple language [that] creates the sense of statement of fact: this is what it is, and you can mourn or lament but it’s better to accept and move on.” Despite the book’s subjects, which include divorce, physical impairment, romance gone awry, and lost friendship, the poems, Young adds, are “not dark ones.”
Emily & Virginia
Barbara Dana, author of A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson and Young Joan, calls Robert McDowell’s novel Emily & Virginia an “extraordinary novel” that is “deeply intelligent, devoted, poetic and timeless, a fantasy so real you can taste it. Woven from meticulous research of the mind and heart, this meeting of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf is a gem. McDowell knows these women, two brilliant artists, each “irreverent, a pistol and painfully shy.”
To read Emily & Virginia, says Kristin Czarnecki, formerly an English professor at Georgetown College, Georgetown, Ky., past president of the Virginia Woolf Society, and now executive director of Rockport (Mass.) Art Association & Museum, is to take “a rollicking journey through time and space, exploring literature, art, friendship, and love in smart, sparkling writing.”
Every Possible Thing
The chapbook Every Possible Thing, by Karen Poppy, “invites the reader to choose tenderness, choose nature, and, overall, to choose life,” writes Hannah Rousselot, a queer French-American poet, author, educator, and host of the podcast Poetry Aloud. “The poems, lines, and stanzas are short and sweet, allowing the reader to savor each image. [. . .] It is not a chapbook to be read quickly but rather one that increases in depth the more deliberately you ponder its words. The images are deliciously juxtaposed.[. . .]
The Gift of Not Finding
Confessing that Carol Alena Aronoff is not her “usual go-to” poet, reviewer Devon Balwit admits that “when I slowed down and read the poems with attention, I found them [to be] tidy koans that rewarded contemplation.” Aronoff’s The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation, Balwit writes, “remind[s] us that there is value in slowing down, in breathing, in allowing.” Having given way to her initial hesitation to “practice” the poems, Balwit ultimately allows “these gentle poems to work and for” her.
A Tale of Two Souls
Republished on Facebook by Highland Park Poetry in 2024, a review by Michael Escoubas, senior editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, describes Shai Har-El’s story-in-verse as “a visual and poetic triumph” by a poet “responding to the constant renewing of life, no matter what life throws in his path.” This “tender” narrative of loss, he writes, “features beautiful photos of nature,” and “weaves a message of love and redemption that will stand the test of time.”
What More Could the Universe Want
In his March 2023 interview with Dennis Sampson, Dan Domench, an American short story writer, playwright, and screenwriter, calls the poet’s ninth collection a “fine book [that] made me jealous of his ability to describe the natural world and consider its mysteries. There are images here made unforgettable by the music of his sentences.”