Publisher: Blue Light Press
September 16, 2021
Paperback: 42 pages (chapbook)
ISBN-10 : 1421837072
ISBN-13 : 978-1421837079
Cost at time of this review: $7.28
5 Stars
From the first poem, If you’re already on the road at five a.m., I was hooked. When on a road trip, I am frequently up and on the road by then. She writes of the Langendorf bread truck—could we have been neighbors at one time? I remember their bread and their bread trucks. And then, she nails me, “…take off your shirt / ride along in just a red tank top even though your arms are a little flabby, but you don’t care” and dare I admit, I, too, drive a Honda. She has written my autobiography in the first poem and done a better job of it by far than I could ever accomplish.
Her poem, Compassion, is a lesson we can all learn from, “This morning I gave five dollars / to a kid on the street / who said he was hungry. Everyone else ignored him”. In Portal, on a “Thick January night” she listens to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach and neither awake nor asleep, her father, “…[a] lover of Bach, / gone twenty long years, / … walks through the portal to join me.” This one brought memories of joy. The portal to my father is classical Spanish guitar.
Avraham writes of a truly tragic loss, of losing her son, and though I have never gone through such a loss, her poetry brought me as close to that heart wrenching pain as possible. Yet, she is neither maudlin nor whiny but introspective and plaintive.
This title of this collection explains the poems contained herein with the joy being alive. The last poem, Just for a While Longer, ends with “Just for a while longer / I want to feel life / jumping up inside me, / spinning me round and round / in circles of wonder.” And that sums the book beautifully. When you own your own copy of this book, you will be able to feel that life and spin and spin in ever widening circles of wonder.
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