Death and Morning<\/em>.<\/p>\nReaders looking for a tell-all confession about the poet\u2019s life will be disappointed.\u00a0 This collection, split into ten roughly equal-sized portions, explores the poet\u2019s relationship with finding and losing love in a cycle that seems, by the end of the collection, to be nearly unbreakable.\u00a0 Yet, despite the impetus to turn to despair, the poet returns each morning to hope instead of defeat.<\/p>\n
This collection of poetry was the winner of the Poetry Book Award at the 2011-2012 Los Angeles Book Festival.\u00a0 It\u2019s thematically related to the author\u2019s two other books of poetry:\u00a0 You, My Love…a diary in verse and How Deep the Pain Goes Quiet, After.<\/p>\n
This collection has some beautiful poems and breathtaking lines.\u00a0 For a reader who likes conversational poems, these lines hit with a harsh truth:\u00a0 \u201cSometimes\/it is\/harder to reach\/the people\/you love most\/than it is\/some total stranger (Contrary to the way it should be).\u201d These poems, however, are the minority.\u00a0 This collection primarily contains poems that take the form of confessional secrets that don\u2019t quite reveal all the nitty-gritty details; instead, the focus is on the emotional fallout of the hazards of love.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s this reviewer\u2019s young age (23) or my preference for conversational, realistic language in poetry, but this collection seemed intentionally obtuse and at times repetitive.\u00a0 Readers may become frustrated with what seems like the revolving door of the speaker\u2019s love life.\u00a0 However, the last poem, \u201cA Year and Seven Months Later,\u201d redeems this cyclical behavior and shows the speaker taking a new path that seems more solid and grounded.<\/p>\n
The primary audience for this collection will be adults with an emotional understanding of the yo-yo that love can sometimes be.\u00a0 Younger audiences may have a hard time connecting with the overarching theme of repeated gain and loss.\u00a0 Atwood makes the reader work for the meaning, but the realization of love\u2019s promise at the dawn of each new day is the reward for the effort.<\/p>\n
Reviewer: John Mack Freeman<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Atwood, Richard. Death and Morning.\u00a0iUniverse Press, 2011. Paperback. 134p. $12.95. 978-1-4502-7134-9. I feel like every review of poetry should be prefaced with Philip Larkin\u2019s quote:\u00a0 \u201cPoetry is nobody\u2019s business except the poet\u2019s.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0Such is the case with Richard Atwood\u2019s 2011 award-winning collection Death and Morning. Readers looking for a tell-all confession about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27,19,40],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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