Genre: Poetry
Actual Rating: 3.5 stars
Content Warnings: Grief
If there’s one thing I love about this poetry book it’s the theme that was followed. The fact that this book was closely linked to the ocean (and the moon) made me really enjoy it. But it was not the greatest poetry collection by any means.
Some poems were immaculately creative and meaningful, but then parts of them made little to no sense. Is that the new theme with poetry books? Because that’s been the case with the last few poetry books I’ve read (both ARCs and already published books). I know art is subjective, and I bet the nonsense parts move some people, but there were parts of some poems that felt like they could’ve been left out of this collection.
Let’s take an example from early on in the book, with the poem “Tides”—which was actually one of my favorite poems because it was one of many that mention whales, and I work with marine mammals for a living. It almost ends like this, which I loved:
“if whales are deep thinkers, do they know
it takes one day and 52 minutes for a point
on earth to be noticed
by the moon?”
Then to be followed by:
“humans believe logic is time
we’re all shift workers
here on the lip of Atlantic”
??? Excuse me? The whole poem was flowing so cohesively right up to the last 3 lines, which felt out of place compared to the pace of the rest of the poem. And this is not a solo occurrence, this kind of weird narrative kept coming up throughout this book. And if you ignored those parts I would even dare and say this could’ve been a 5-star poetry book for me, but with all the intrusive thoughts and nonsense verses, it just really wasn’t.
I haven’t talked about nonsense verses yet, not really. But an example of this can be seen in the poem “Sea Change”, where there’s a verse that makes no sense no matter how you spin it:
“if whales have everlasting memory
then what does the moon recall?
some say grandmother”
First, what does whale memory recollection have to do with the moon? Second, what does it have to do with a grandmother? Third, and most importantly, what was even the purpose of this poem as a whole?
I know it sounds like I’m being unfair to this book, but these things happened constantly and were too repetitive to ignore. Also, this poetry collection was so heavy on the imagery that sometimes you lost track of what was being told in the poem. Sometimes too much is actually too much.
Ignoring my criticism of this piece, I would actually recommend this book a lot. I would recommend it for poetry readers that are looking for a book that’s mid- on everything. It’s mid-sad, mid-clever, mid-happy, mid-length, and mid-life-changing. It’s perfect for a quick airport read or a break between emotionally-charged books.
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ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
andrea's galley 