#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:
- Perfect 92 pages to enjoy during a heat wave
- …refreshing as a glass of summer lemonade with ice!
- Not every poem is a ‘home-run’ but all in all
- an excellent collection!
- Poems are like people.
- When you meet people you can like someone immediately
- …or don’t even like them at first. Then, gradually, as you get
- to know them you begin to apprecaite their qualities.
- So is it with poems:
- poem is immediately enjoyable
- reminds you of something you experienced
- “ How true, I felt exactly the same!”
- Some poems are hard to understand at first.
- .and by the second reading you start
- to understand what the poet is really saying.
- My favorite poems were:
- Seeing Yellow – excellent (…hospital visit to the now late poet Pearse Hutchinson)
- Heimat – breathtaking
- Lament for the Birds (discover who Bourke is talking about …poem is a puzzle!)
- My brother writes to me – (…reality of chemotherapy and counting swallows)
- By the River – pastoral poem at its best!
- Plans – dedicated to her husband Ono …the love of her life (RIP 28.12.2017)
Strong point:
- Eva Bourke makes some
- …original and imaginative comparisons
- to convey shades of meaning in a few words.
- Example:
- Sunflowers: ‘rough stalks like tourches’
- Sky: ‘so smooth like a freshly ironed sheet’
- Birds: ‘…fell like stars from the sky into the river to catch their prey’
- Beetles: “…like miniature knights chiselled from jet
- …dispatched on impossible errands..”
Last thoughts:
- ….IMO
- 11 Excellent poems
- 8 very good poems
- 12 average…did not make emotional impression on me
- 8 .. not my kind of poems
- …experimental, fragmented
- …for poetry die hards!
- Book is available via Kindle
- …and perhaps in your library!
- #QuickRead
- .…poetry really does refresh the soul!
“Seeing Yellow” (title poem about sunflowers is…..magical!)
6 Comments
Post a comment
I like how you refer to reading poems as getting to know new people. Very apt as I meander my way through Blakwork.
Poetry is so unique! After reading ‘Seeing Yellow” (…about sunflowers)
I bought 20 at the supermarket to take home.
I never really looked closely at the flower…just as Eva Brouke said
“…round black faces inside their yellow ruffs….”.
Extraordinary how with this little poem
…keeps following me…like a new friend!
Thanks for you comments….an looking forward to your poem on Thursday post!