Death and Morning

 

cover of Death and Morning

Atwood, Richard. Death and Morning. iUniverse Press, 2011. Paperback. 134p. $12.95. 978-1-4502-7134-9.

 

I feel like every review of poetry should be prefaced with Philip Larkin’s quote:  “Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s.”   Such is the case with Richard Atwood’s 2011 award-winning collection Death and Morning.

Readers looking for a tell-all confession about the poet’s life will be disappointed.  This collection, split into ten roughly equal-sized portions, explores the poet’s relationship with finding and losing love in a cycle that seems, by the end of the collection, to be nearly unbreakable.  Yet, despite the impetus to turn to despair, the poet returns each morning to hope instead of defeat.

This collection of poetry was the winner of the Poetry Book Award at the 2011-2012 Los Angeles Book Festival.  It’s thematically related to the author’s two other books of poetry:  You, My Love…a diary in verse and How Deep the Pain Goes Quiet, After.

This collection has some beautiful poems and breathtaking lines.  For a reader who likes conversational poems, these lines hit with a harsh truth:  “Sometimes/it is/harder to reach/the people/you love most/than it is/some total stranger (Contrary to the way it should be).” These poems, however, are the minority.  This collection primarily contains poems that take the form of confessional secrets that don’t quite reveal all the nitty-gritty details; instead, the focus is on the emotional fallout of the hazards of love.

Maybe it’s this reviewer’s young age (23) or my preference for conversational, realistic language in poetry, but this collection seemed intentionally obtuse and at times repetitive.  Readers may become frustrated with what seems like the revolving door of the speaker’s love life.  However, the last poem, “A Year and Seven Months Later,” redeems this cyclical behavior and shows the speaker taking a new path that seems more solid and grounded.

The primary audience for this collection will be adults with an emotional understanding of the yo-yo that love can sometimes be.  Younger audiences may have a hard time connecting with the overarching theme of repeated gain and loss.  Atwood makes the reader work for the meaning, but the realization of love’s promise at the dawn of each new day is the reward for the effort.

Reviewer: John Mack Freeman

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