Pablo Neruda: If You Forget Me

Pablo Neruda breaks my heart in the best way. I can’t pick a favorite, but If You Forget Me is up there. His work is best read in Spanish as he wrote it, there is something that gets lost in translation but the work is still beautiful nonetheless in English. He evokes emotion with his words and I dip into my little Neruda collection from time to time just to savor it.

everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
-read the poem in its entirety here

What do you think of this one?

April is National Poetry Month, follow this link for more.

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disclaimer:
The photo above is my own and is not to be removed from this post.

Killing The Love

Seeing how April is National Poetry Month, I wanted to share a few of my favorite poems these few weeks.  I like Anne Sexton so much because her poetry is so raw. She put it all out there and there is something to be said for that. Her poems are passionate and intense.

A snippet from a favorite of hers called “Killing the Love”. 

I am the love killer,
I am murdering the music we thought so special,
that blazed between us, over and over.
I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
I am pushing knives through the hands
that created two into one.
Our hands do not bleed at this,
they lie still in their dishonor….

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/killing-the-love/

What do you think of this one? Do you have a favorite Anne Sexton poem, or a favorite by another poet?

Thanks for stopping by, enjoy your day.

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disclaimer:
The photo above is my own and not to be removed from this post.

Book Tour: WTF by Laura Foley

source: Free review copy courtesy of Poetic Book Tours
title: WTF
author: Laura Foley
genre: poetry
published: 2017
pages: 29
first line: The night before his imprisonment….

Blurb:
Laura Foley’s “WTF” refers to her father’s initials and, slyly, to the abbreviated colloquial exclamation, in a pun that laughs and cuts, in this reckoning with a fraught father-daughter relationship. These spare poems communicate more like snapshots than narrative lyrics, beginning with sympathy and gratitude, moving through disappointment, anger and resentment, without ever losing compassion, as Foley examines her father’s formative WWII experiences and, consequently, how he shaped her experience and character, ending with a positive recognition of her father in herself.

Read some sample poems here: https://www.readcwbooks.com/foley_poems.html

My thoughts:
I enjoy reading poetry very much and as soon as I saw the blurb and title for WTF by Laura Foley it caught my attention. “WTF” are her father’s initials, William Thomas Foley, and she wrote this collection in his memory. WTF was a WWII vet and most of the twenty poems here reflect on this. A few of the poems are about his being a POW, about playing cards with him and about her parents getting divorced.

Born twelve years later, I learn
for him the war is never over.
-WTF by Laura Foley

This is a quiet collection and poetry comes from the heart, the best kind I think comes from heartache and I felt that in this set.

The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton

source: free review copy via NetGalley / Open Road Media
title: The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton
published: April 5, 2016
pages: 340
genre: poetry

Blurb:
The collected works of Anne Sexton showcase the astonishing career of one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets

For Anne Sexton, writing served as both a means of expressing the inner turmoil she experienced for most of her life and as a therapeutic force through which she exorcised her demons. Some of the richest poetic descriptions of depression, anxiety, and desperate hope can be found within Sexton’s work. The Complete Poems, which includes the eight collections published during her life, two posthumously published books, and other poems collected after her death, brings together her remarkable body of work with all of its range of emotion.

With her first collection, the haunting To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Sexton stunned critics with her frank treatment of subjects like masturbation, incest, and abortion, blazing a trail for representations of the body, particularly the female body, in poetry. She documented four years of mental illness in her moving Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Live or Die, and reimagined classic fairy tales as macabre and sardonic poems in Transformations. The Awful Rowing Toward God, the last book finished in her lifetime, is an earnest and affecting meditation on the existence of God. As a whole, The Complete Poems reveals a brilliant yet tormented poet who bared her deepest urges, fears, and desires in order to create extraordinarily striking and enduring art.

My thoughts:

I find that Anne Sexton’s work is painful, beautiful and uncomfortable all at once. This is a nice collection for those especially who enjoy her poetry. This contains the complete collection of her work in the order that she wrote it, ending with the poems that were published posthumously.

Phenomenal Woman

…Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me….
–Maya Angelou

read the poem in its entirety here…

Back in high school, Maya Angelou was the first poet whose work I read that resonated with me. She has long since been a favorite. I read her books I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas and I was just in awe at her writing and storytelling. The words flowed off the pages, captivating and inspiring me. Reading her work I knew she had been through so much and survived to tell her story, that alone is inspirational.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in this post is available for download. The photo above is my own and not to be removed from this post.