Emerald Breath: Poems that awaken the mystery
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I read each poem in Emerald Breath once, twice, three times, embracing the depth of feeling each reading evokes. The poems of Cosetta Romani reach into my being to satiate a longing I knew not that I had. I close the cover of Emerald Breath, wondering: How might I describe poems whose words awaken such mystery sleeping inside me?

Emerald Breath teaches me to honor my lifes path, my being, so similar to the seasonal paths of red poppies, trees, crows, boas, wind, and sun; poems that bless nature by painting scenes of gratitude and love; poems whose healing words nurture a hope in my heart; poems that draw me into a marriage of the seen and the unseen. And I remain embraced by natures depths of wonder; still held in awe by my souls Emerald Breath journey.

Thank you for this deep experience, Cosetta Romani.
Ardith Davis Cole
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I recently finished Silver Birch Press' Noir Erasure Poetry Anthology and thoroughly enjoyed it.

For those who may not know, erasure poetry is where a poet takes a section or page(s) of text that has already been written or printed, then erases (blacks-out) words within that text. The words that remain are what make up the newly created poem.

For this anthology, forty-six poets were asked to create erasure poems using text from pages of books by noir authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. A poet could choose a noir author, then use any page from a book by that author to create his or her erasure poem. The result is an interesting mix that pays homage to both the works of the noir genre and the poetic form.

The outside of the book is nicely presented with white text on a black cover, which I can't help but see as a nod to the noir era. The inside contains an introduction and a list of the poets along with the page number the poem appears on. I appreciated how there was also a page listing all of the noir authors used in the book and the page numbers where poems created from their works appeared on. Pages containing poems also referenced the author and book where the specific page used to make the poem is from.

The final pages of the book contain informative write-ups about the noir authors used in the anthology as well as bios for the contributing poets. The book as a whole seems to have been put together with care, reflecting an apprecation for both the noir genre and for the poets involved in the project.

Aside from the actual poems, what I enjoyed most about this book was the layout used to display the poets' contributions: Each poem was presented separately on its own, but there was also a photocopy of the corresponding book page the poet physically altered/erased to create that poem. Many of these page alterations were done by hand, making for a uniquely tangible, personal connection to the poet and the way the they approached the words on the page. Having both the altered original book page and the finished poem side-by-side were fantastic compliments each other.

The newly created poems varied in length, format and mood. Some poems seemed to have been created more at random, going for more of a surreal effect; others appeared to be approached from a more conventional standpoint and went for more concrete ideas. Some were very short and used very little of the available text while others were long and used not just individual words but whole sentences at a time from the original text.

Regardless of the method of creation, all of the poems were enjoyable to read and it was fascinating seeing words from the noir genre authors being transformed into poetic form. As a collection, the unpredictability from poem to poem created a sort of enigmatic atmosphere that fit the genre it was attached to.

This was very intriguing to have such a range of moods set against the backdrop and language of the noir genre, which, to different degrees of permeation, affected the creative poetic works produced in this fine anthology.
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The poetry in this collection reaches into the reader's heart and twists it, giving us a glimpse into `what if' and `what can never be'. The pain expressed in many of the pieces is filled with regret, longing, and love. Though somber, these poems leave you craving more.

Through her poetry, Shannon Riley allows the reader to enter a hidden realm, a world where sunlight no longer rules, and beings older than time give voice to their thoughts. Her deft weaving with words embraces the reader and brings us into the darkness, then with a gentle push, releases us to breathe in the light once again.

I highly recommend this collection. It definitely left me yearning for more.
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Sometimes dark, sometimes comical, sometimes existential; a portrait of the world is painted by the poems in this compilation. The author often employs a delightful technique wherein he explores a significant life moment by focusing on a microcosm of that moment. "The Bridge of 61 Breaths" takes me back to a time when getting home meant crossing a bridge in the middle of nowhere, an inescapable moment of every day that I'd promptly forget. "I Found My Jill on Lemon Hill" reminds me of that one unforgettable lust who got away. "My Native State, Virginia" -- a beautiful double-entendre -- also evokes missed/lost love, still remembered after a long passage of time. The anti-reductionism of "Powdered Water" and the invocation of Sagan's garage dragon in "Sin -- It's In" evoke an ongoing debate about the nature of the universe that the author and I frequently have. This compilation paints in broad and subtle strokes, and I recommend it to any fan of contemporary poetry.

Abyssinia,
the reader
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This essay collection  contains appreciations written with elegance and conviction about a group of fresh, often radiantly achieved, poems. They are authored by  a range of (mostly) contemporary authors sharing a common reach toward the mystical.  Intended to acquaint ordinary readers with spiritually refreshing poetry, "Twenty Poems," provides both a rich account of the transporting dimension of several marvelous poems; and serves as  an enactment of spiritual energy itself. Authors Valente and Reynard, a married couple, are poets themselves; and there is disarming directness in the advice they offer on how to apprehend beautiful, spiritually based poetry; and how to most productively live with it afterwards - so that it lives within you. This book, meant to illuminate gems of poetry, is a gem itself.
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There is a good range of poetry in this special little book, a book that would serve well on a retreat or wilderness journey.

Scripture, or Holy Writs, are texts which various traditions consider sacred or of central importance. "Scripture of Leaves"
is a gentle and harmonious expression of the author's interior life which is rich.

The poems in this book create an attentive listening within the reader. Mr. Stafford was correct in stating within the introduction that "he intends to reach out for you and to gain your allegiance, if you give it a chance." Not 'attention' mind you, but "allegiance".

Some poetic reflections awaken that which is in one's deepest self, a place that is often blurred by inattention and divisiveness of our lives. The poetry has a nice mixture of memory and contemplative elements born from the authors keen spirit of obsevation. In this connection I like the poems "Bowing" and one of my favorites, "Lessons at Grandpa's Knee". The latter shows quite nicely how the delicate balance of life has been affected by our disregard of the cause and effect of the things we do in the name of so many things. Mr. Stafford is an eco-naturalist at heart.

Reading this book allows a snapshot into the interior life of Mr. Stafford. It is a good book to refer to time and time again, but in your quiet moments. You will put it down but somehow want more of the book's soul.

Donald J. Da Ros
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A funeral bugler in Deena Hardins collection of poems entitled Seeking El Dorado is compelled to hit four notes impeccably, despite personal imperfections, to honor what lies before him. That vulnerable and yet determined bugler is a metaphor for the poet, using her own ambiguous and often enigmatic encounters with God and man to honor both. Hardins best four notes are perfectly intoned in this handsome volume. They are first, involuntary remembrances; second, tragicomic imagery; third, sensory language and fourth, poetic forms.
Two of the best notes the poet plays involve the device of involuntary remembrances, those familiar moments in which entire areas of our past are borne in upon us by some sensation. The poem, Sunday Morning, begins with one that immediately universalizes the experience to follow. The first line is That wine tastes like a long ago love. Adding synesthesia to the image makes it even more poignant. Another involuntary remembrance is deftly conveyed in 3985. There, the entire quirky personality of a grandfather is wrought through sensations on a train.
The second noteworthy note played in this volume has to do with tragicomic imagery. The ironic poem Occupant tells the story of receiving the wrong mail in a way that combines expectation and joy with dismal disappointment. Perhaps there is no intentional humor here, but the incongruity draws it. Even laughter may erupt from splendid similies like this one from Boxes: Naked as a dandelion in a windstorm, or Like chocolate chips on an asphalt cookie from the title poem.
The third note of note in Hardins collection is in the area of sensory language. The poet captures ambivalence in Forms Divine by way of the odd imagery of dreams. The verse ends with the lines: Awakening from dreams of heaven, one wonders how to dream. A similar capture comes in Vicarious Vignettes with the image: Darkened doorways of the mind.
Finally, though the poet writes abundant free verse, even she invariably creates her own highly functional form. My favorite entries are My Truth, an English sonnet about the difficulties of a relationship after great loss; Seizure, perhaps the most tender and best wrought poem in the book; Tribute, a villanelle which lives on emotion and irony. It is anything but a tribute. Turn of Events is an extended metaphor comparing life to a malfunctioning vending machine. At the top of my list of favorites is Things I Dont Want to Know, a well-formed list that ends, How to bury a child.
If you buy this splendid collection, you will go back to it repeatedly, because it is both entertaining and enlightening. The notes will sound on violet strings and you will be enriched by the music of our humanity.
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Here is a new poet who blazes into our consciousness like Blake's tiger burning bright. I came upon Emma Jones's first book of poems at Wordworth's Dove Cottage in Grasmere, The Lake District, where she's poet in residence.

Jones engages the reader right away with this tightly-written, brilliant collection. Beginning at the beginning, she's concerned with her own birth in "Waking" where she imagines "when my mother woke and felt a twitch// inside, like the shifting of curtains." Very nice image. That evocative "filmy fluttery" feeling. We are in for a ride of sensations and colors. And it's not her (the poet/speaker's) waking but the mother's. We're treated to the image of her as the fluttering, pent-up bird trying to get free throughout these remarkable poems.

What range Jones has! In "Daphne" she takes flight to the classical. Right away I was with Ovid, and Richard Strauss. But no, it is really she, the poet as sensing being who tells us: "I'm not that happy. It's good to be a girl,// and a tree, with the wind in it. It's good// to move in the wind, and to move the wind.// My leaves all move. They sing, and make the world.

Wow. A poet is speaking as herself, a nymph and a tree all at the same time. That's poetry! And thanks, Emma, for giving us back the word "girl" as something that is not anathema. Congratulations on your confidence with that word.

Confidence with words--how about that! One after another, each poem shows it:
"Window," "The Mind," and "Sonnet" (oh my, that range again): "'Where's your terminus?'// The flowers are wan// travellers. They unpack their cases. All// they know, they are. Renewal, rest. Renewal."

This poetry collection is filled with surprises. The world itself is a kind of tiger. Striped, that is. In "Painted Tigers" Jones shows us Delacoriox tigers and school textbook tigers. Communists painting tigers. Tigers present and absent. There and not there. Could this be the on and off stripedness of the world? "Snow is a philosophy. It paints tigers.// And the tiger has nothing on its mind."

I went to Dove Cottage to see Wordsworth's living quarters and try to imbue myself with something of his world. Thank you, Emma Jones. I did not expect to find that world to be striped. But it was.
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The author is a poet and writes a daily thought or meditation beautifully.  Suggestions to take you deeper
are at the end of each writing.  I love it!
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A collection of sonnets (14 lines), sestinas (39 lines) and coronas (longer that the classical sonnet) written by a woman well educated in literature. The theme is love. The story told by the poems is a continuous inspiring understanding of love in all its facets and depths. The tone of the poems is an expression of the writer's feelings using the connectivity of man's body, spirit and soul with nature, digging into the essence and nature of love.

The reader experiences exploration, amusement, elation, ecstasy, sorrow and pain infused by words like:
mourning, desire, fickle heart, games of love, dreams, jealousy, forbidden love, blankness, unfulfilled  love, hearts weeping for kind words, entrapment, tears, awakening, silence.....

The poems are awakening and a confirmation of feelings a woman experiences in her quest for true love  and the expression of pain in lost love. Sentiments of joy, passion, lust and mourning are expressed in imagery like flames, storms, sky, stars, sea, river, clouds ... An example : "a grey and mourning dove stealing and killing heart".

The passion, desire and loss of love is reinforced by phrases like " infested love", "faded and distorted love", love without passion is a lie", and "feigned love is seen as "a thief of passion".

Literature has, through her schooling and experience,  made a true and pure imprint on this talented poet who is a wordsmith by nature. Her work is easily communicated in written and verbal form. For me as reviewer, it was a cleansing exercise to review Ms Sobey's work. The value of her work to a reader is defined  by her in Sonnet 130: Deepest Connexions. In summary:

Connecting minds is what poetry does. Connecting readers to the poet's prized words, carefully etched, grown from her soul to connect the body, mind and spirit of the reader through special words  that create meanings and a voice so receptive to the soul. For silence is "the verse so blank you write".

Readers pick love's flower and like birds and bees, plunge into this love's flower, which is nature's gift to us so that we can find love and joy, fulfilment and connexions ( x= poet's choice).

Words excite and connects this poet's heart to mine!

Scarlett Jensen
21 May 2015
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Dr. Sandra Ellston's Poems Along the Way  is a collection of poems paying homage to the best of the Chinese poets writing in the T'ang Dynasty (between c. 600 and 900 A.D.).  Each poem evokes the essence of one of the poems of these masters; taken together they represent a year-long mountain journey (perhaps an exile), with its loneliness, longing, losses, and separations, ending at last in homecoming. Its 52-poem format makes it an excellent weekly companion book, to be slowly savored.

Ellston is a sensitive poet.  Her unerring ear for language and her intuitive understanding of the originals have created a text both pleasing in itself as poetry, and doing honor to the poets of a long-past era.  Readers interested in either Chinese poets or in poetry itself will relish it.
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McClatchy's new book is an absolute delight, one to savor and read and re-read. This volume includes highlights from previous works as well as new poems, stunning and clever translations, and poems inspired by music and musical forms. The selection of poems charts the course of a strong and rare poetic spirit, one that unabashedly explores preoccupations of the soul, meditates on the nature of friends and lovers, and turns finally to resignation and elegiac reflection. Among the new poems: "Wolf's Trees" is beautiful. Rapture and grief, longing and loneliness grow into a sanctuary of waiting trees, not so empty any more but satisfyingly unfilled like the "emptiness visible on leaves that come and go." "My Hand Collection" is powerful yet tender, exploring the human hand as a living documentary while holding on to the hardest of all letting gos (letting go of loved ones). The depth and beauty evoked by these poems can be found in the last lines from "Ovid's Farewell": "It comes to pass, the last change / As the first, from a stream of star-shot / Wonderment that falls down to our home on earth."
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Shadows of Life is a wonderful and emotional collection of poems written by Saudi-based Doctor Nazreen. Broken into three parts, Nazreen touches on a myriad of subjects, such as love, loss and the chaos of living all while highlighting the brief moments in between.
Ill be honest and say that this is the first book of poetry Ive read in a long time, Ive been distracted by too many novels, but Im happy to say that this collection was a good way to ease my way back into the genre. Nazreens poems read like a journey, one poem flowing into the next, with slight breaks in between, giving you a moment to soak in the all the emotion along the way. Starting with the first poem its clear that the goal of the writing is to release the hurt, pain and struggle of an ending relationship. As you're reading you can feel the raw emotion emanating off the page, creating a strong connection between author and reader.
For I do not love you anymore, that is certain, and youhave moved on and found happiness, that is irrefutable.
While most of the poems are focused on heartbreak, a relationship torn in two, and betrayal, there are also some gems touching on other topics, almost giving you the feeling of walking in someone elses shoes. One particular poem called Existence is a wake up call, a nice reminder to not let life pass you by. My personal favorite, Bohemian, is a fantastical, adventurous poem that shows you how magic is to be found where ever you look.
I long to find faeries, beneath the skiesWith resplendent wings and iridescent eyesWhen a hush steals over the woods at nightLulling it to slumber tight.
With such a variety Nazreen shows her range of writing skills and pure strength of self. Her poems are unique and original and lovely to read, Im certainly looking forward to seeing what else she comes up with. If you enjoy poetry that pulls at your heartstrings, makes you feel everything fully and reminds you of the importance of living then I definitely recommend Shadows of Life to you.

A copy of the book was provided to me by the author in exchange for an honest review.
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Evocative and mysterious poems rich with beautiful language and wonderful phrases - my favourite is "the delicate insect legs of God."
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This beautiful collection of poems inspired by words nominally untranslatable from other languages to English is amazing.  I also love the cover art!

Of my several favorites in this collection, the final poem is inspired by the word "Tingo" credited the Easter Islanders meaning roughly "to borrow a friend's possessions one by one until they have nothing left"

I highly recommend this sweet  collection from one of my favorite contemporary poets.

Another great title from this poet is: The Never Ending Poem by the Poets of Everything
  https://www.amazon.com/Never-Ending-Poem-Poets-Everything/dp/1495481360
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If you ever wondered why Irish Poetry stands alone,this collection should show answer your questions..
 It is a collection of 41 poems read by some of Ireland's best known and loved personalities. It has always amazed me that a country,whose population today is still less than 5 million could have produced the amount of great poets,writers and music that have come out of this little island in the sea,which truly deserves the name of "The Emerald Isle".This is not a new phenomenon,but has continued for centuries. Maybe there is something in the water or maybe God decided to create something special that accounts for the reason so much has come from so few.
 This book is especially wonderful as it covers poetry from many times,and writers;but it also comes with a CD which has each of the poems recorded by various personalities. I have never been that great of a lover of poetry,especially where I had to simply read it. However,to just find a quiet spot,and sit and follow the printed words and listen to these great poems read with the "lilt" of these talented Irish personalities,is a whole different experience.
 I note that there is another book listed on Amazon by the same title,but has over 100 poems. It appears that it is a larger version ,but with over twice as many poems and presumably even more personalities doing the readings.
  Even if you are like me ,and have trouble appreciating poetry;give this book a try;I am sure you'll love it.
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In Laith Biltaji's debut "Inspirations", a collection of poems, songs and reflections, the words reach you in an effortless style yet leave you contemplating the diverse realities we live in at different levels of consciousness. His words are our own dissected, fashioned and molded in a synergy of the simple and intricate; feelings that we all identify with but fail to express or communicate.

The poems unveil the ambiguity of our feelings and inject life in our thoughts as a fresh misty breeze in a wavering sail. Laith shares his personal experiences in a temporal world and offers his impressions many of which we may not muster the courage to articulate.

Laith presents an array of delightful poems with ethereal lightness. He strings words that echo our feelings, passions, fears of loneliness not aloneness, trepidation, and anxiety into a collage of songs, poetry and poignant reflections, some hitherto not contemplated.

Exhilarating reading I simply could not put the book down.