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Love Notes: A Collection of Romantic Poetry
Love shared, love in secret, celebrated, exploded. Unrequited longing and love that’s mellowed through the years. Love at long distance, across continents, so close there’s no space to breathe, or never quite close enough. Love lost and love found. Love from the inside out and love from the outside in.
Love Notes has it all: a collection of poetry as diverse as the experience of falling in love itself. A shared candied apple, a farewell at Paddington Station, a name scribbled in a notebook, a face that leaves us breath less, a single word that changes our life forever. Love Notes is a rich tapestry of verse woven from fragments of life and those moments that make falling in love so irresistible. And so ineveitable.
Love is unique, love is universal. Love is everywhere.
Love Notes has it all: a collection of poetry as diverse as the experience of falling in love itself. A shared candied apple, a farewell at Paddington Station, a name scribbled in a notebook, a face that leaves us breath less, a single word that changes our life forever. Love Notes is a rich tapestry of verse woven from fragments of life and those moments that make falling in love so irresistible. And so ineveitable.
Love is unique, love is universal. Love is everywhere.
146 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 28, 2012
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December 8, 2013
It wouldn't be Valentine's Day without a love poem or two. It's probably the one time of year when all the non-poets out there give a shot at writing a few sing song lines of verse to impress their paramour, or they run to their nearest Hallmark store like the rest of us. "Roses are red..."
Being a poet myself, of which some of my earliest writing was the occasional birthday poem or a verse for Mom on Mother's Day, I still have an appreciation for the art and enjoy collections like Love Notes, an anthology just released by Vagabondage Press last month.
Romantic poetry is some of the easiest clichéd and predictable stuff out there, but none of that is true for this specific collection which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. Romanticism in poems tends to drone on and on about fluttering butterflies, long lasting kisses and embraces, naked bodies, hearts skipping beats, and the like, but there is actually only one poem in this book that takes up more than two pages. The majority are quick verses often wrapped up in a dozen lines or less, which is the way poetry should be these days. Quick, but memorable.
Love poems, or notes in this case, should also be privy to a specific event or place in time in order to paint a picture in the reader or listener's mind. A good majority of the poems in this anthology do just that. We have a first date, a summer walk, a day at the beach, an evening in the bedroom, breakfast, a day at the park, and so on. Good poets are also able to take such a specific time and place and shrink it down to the bare essence, often at times highlighting the minute details that the rest of us will certainly overlook, and this book is full of those delicate details. That's what good poetry is about. Here's a bit from one called "Overheated" by Brigitte Goetze:
A late afternoon sun covered the audience
like an electric blanket turned on too high.
The low rumble of the lecturer's voice,
slow and circulatory as a clothes dryer,
mesmerized. I, with my fountain pen,
blue ink spurting like steam
from an overheated pressure cooker,
wrote just one word
over and over and over again...
Of course, the one word is revealed by the end of the poem, but the poet does a wonderful job of drawing you into the setting with just enough detail and imagery to keep you reading. Here's another from "First Love Is Best Love" by Martin Willitts Jr.:
The elegance of the sudden ledge,
straight-down-dizzy,
where wet surface flat shale rock
and spongy-moss
makes us almost lose footing,
like love
reminds me how dangerous it could be
to is what is in front of you.
Great use of word play, and the break in sentence to create the verse gives us that sense of falling over the edge. The return to the metaphor of love makes the poem memorable and makes us want to go back and read it again.
I appreciate poetry collections made up of work where the poets had fun with it. Instead of our typical, left justified blocks of verse, we have broken stanzas often justified to the left or the right of the page which create nice flow. We even have some poems with the words arranged to create a shape or picture. One poem in the collection is arranged to look like a pair of rain drops.
Collections like these are great for romance because its a non-typical greeting card way to express your love for someone. Read them aloud, copy a few verses to a love note of your own, or rip out the pages and tape them around the house for your lover to find when you get home. Or, if you are celebrating V-Day alone this year, but this book and save it for the special day that's sure to come.
Being a poet myself, of which some of my earliest writing was the occasional birthday poem or a verse for Mom on Mother's Day, I still have an appreciation for the art and enjoy collections like Love Notes, an anthology just released by Vagabondage Press last month.
Romantic poetry is some of the easiest clichéd and predictable stuff out there, but none of that is true for this specific collection which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. Romanticism in poems tends to drone on and on about fluttering butterflies, long lasting kisses and embraces, naked bodies, hearts skipping beats, and the like, but there is actually only one poem in this book that takes up more than two pages. The majority are quick verses often wrapped up in a dozen lines or less, which is the way poetry should be these days. Quick, but memorable.
Love poems, or notes in this case, should also be privy to a specific event or place in time in order to paint a picture in the reader or listener's mind. A good majority of the poems in this anthology do just that. We have a first date, a summer walk, a day at the beach, an evening in the bedroom, breakfast, a day at the park, and so on. Good poets are also able to take such a specific time and place and shrink it down to the bare essence, often at times highlighting the minute details that the rest of us will certainly overlook, and this book is full of those delicate details. That's what good poetry is about. Here's a bit from one called "Overheated" by Brigitte Goetze:
A late afternoon sun covered the audience
like an electric blanket turned on too high.
The low rumble of the lecturer's voice,
slow and circulatory as a clothes dryer,
mesmerized. I, with my fountain pen,
blue ink spurting like steam
from an overheated pressure cooker,
wrote just one word
over and over and over again...
Of course, the one word is revealed by the end of the poem, but the poet does a wonderful job of drawing you into the setting with just enough detail and imagery to keep you reading. Here's another from "First Love Is Best Love" by Martin Willitts Jr.:
The elegance of the sudden ledge,
straight-down-dizzy,
where wet surface flat shale rock
and spongy-moss
makes us almost lose footing,
like love
reminds me how dangerous it could be
to is what is in front of you.
Great use of word play, and the break in sentence to create the verse gives us that sense of falling over the edge. The return to the metaphor of love makes the poem memorable and makes us want to go back and read it again.
I appreciate poetry collections made up of work where the poets had fun with it. Instead of our typical, left justified blocks of verse, we have broken stanzas often justified to the left or the right of the page which create nice flow. We even have some poems with the words arranged to create a shape or picture. One poem in the collection is arranged to look like a pair of rain drops.
Collections like these are great for romance because its a non-typical greeting card way to express your love for someone. Read them aloud, copy a few verses to a love note of your own, or rip out the pages and tape them around the house for your lover to find when you get home. Or, if you are celebrating V-Day alone this year, but this book and save it for the special day that's sure to come.
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