Wesseling’s spare verse cuts through the insidious chatter of the modern day and reminds readers of words’ stark power.
Good poets know that poetry is no facile concatenation of rhymes and rhythms, but instead the hard-won result of wrestling with the rudiments of a language we think we know but don’t. Wesseling is a good poet, and the foundation of her verse is the basic challenge of human communication—bridging the gap between people. She describes her increasing obsession with that gap in an early piece: “More and more / I focus on the distancers / walls of flesh and skin / making and separating us. / And the air thin nothing / to carry our voices.” “[D]istancers”—those things that keep people apart, keep people from connecting—are crucial to the author’s worldview, as they can turn communications into “inefficient twitterings.” She yearns to make her own twitterings more efficient, but she notes that content, too, is quite difficult to convey. “Here’s a poem,” she writes in “Community,” “What’s it about? That’s / hard to answer. It has to do / with who you are and who / you are to me.” One way she tries to make her poetry more efficient is to pare it down to the simplest diction, using only the most basic building blocks of language; take the opening lines of “Impatient,” for example: “I don’t know why we didn’t use that afternoon / to buy oranges, some fruit. It was / dark enough. Heavy, greasy.” This whittling-away also has the happy effect of reminding readers just how much meaning they may wring from little words. But Wesseling’s efforts aren’t all dour striving, and she never loses her sense of humor. In “Prayer,” a lament addressed to an ineffectual deity, she writes of “God / mismanager of the funds of the universe / probably embezzling up there / and that’s why I have all these parking tickets.” To fit some laughs into such an admirably serious undertaking is no small feat.
Strong poetry whittled to a fine, sharp point.
Pub Date: March 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1467890458
Page Count: 60
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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