#Poetry Eva Bourke (Irish poet)

• Author: Eva Bourke
• Title: Seeing Yellow
  
• Published: 2018
• Trivia: 2019 shortlist Irish Times Poetry Award
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly reading plan
• #20BooksOfSummer
• #TBR 2019   8/43
• Twitter: @nl_burns

 

Finished: 25.06.2019
Genre: poetry (39 poems)
Rating: A+++

 

Conclusion:

1. Perfect 92 pages to enjoy during a heat wave
2. …refreshing as a glass of summer lemonade with ice!

1. Not every poem is a ‘home-run’ but all in all
2. an excellent collection!
3. Poems are like people.
4. When you meet people you can like someone immediately
5. …or don’t even like them at first. Then, gradually, as you get
6. to know them you begin to apprecaite their qualities.
7. So is it with poems:
8. poem is immediately enjoyable
9. reminds you of something you experienced
10. “ How true, I felt exactly the same!”
11. Some poems are  hard to understand at first.
12. .and by the second reading you start
13. to understand what the poet is really saying.
14. My favorite poems were:
15. Seeing Yellow – excellent (…hospital visit to the now late poet Pearse Hutchinson)
    
16. Heimat – breathtaking
17. Lament for the Birds (discover who Bourke is talking about …poem is a puzzle!)
18. My brother writes to me – (…reality of chemotherapy and counting swallows)
19. By the River – pastoral poem at its best!
20. Plans – dedicated to her husband Ono …the love of her life (RIP 28.12.2017)

 

Strong point:

1. Eva Bourke makes some
2. …original and imaginative comparisons
3. to convey shades of meaning in a few words.
4. Example:
5. Sunflowers:  ‘rough stalks like tourches’
6. Sky:  ‘so smooth like a freshly ironed sheet’
7. Birds: ‘…fell like stars from the sky into the river to catch their prey’
8. Beetles: “…like miniature knights chiselled from jet
9. …dispatched on impossible errands..”

 

Last thoughts:

1. ….IMO
2. 11 Excellent poems
3. 8 very good poems
4. 12 average…did not make emotional impression on me
5. 8 .. not my kind of poems
6. …experimental, fragmented
7. …for poetry die hards!
8. Book is available via Kindle
9. …and perhaps in your library!
10. #QuickRead
11. .…poetry  really does refresh the soul!

 

“Seeing Yellow” (title poem  about sunflowers is…..magical!)