Customer Reviews

Air, Angels & Us (Argonne House Press chapbooks)

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I have had the honor of publishing Ms. Fasel's verse in the pages of my own magazine, Ancient Paths. This offering, "Air, Angels, and Us," contains 48 poems. Ida Fasel's poetry is decidedly "modern" in its style but without the pretension and contempt for grammar that often makes contemporary poetry unpalatable. Her rhythms are frequently soft and smooth, and the reader is carried along by poetic repetition and other devices. Abbreviated lines, when used, most often serve as a means of transition and do not jar the reader from the easy flow of the text, although the verse can in rare instance appear choppy.

As might be guessed from the book's title, angels are a recurring theme throughout the collection, and admittedly not my favorite subject matter. But Fasel treats angels, which are something of a current fashionable trend, with complexity and subtlety. The book also explores a variety of other themes, such as unity ("Pledge"), the human mind ("Aloft"), and the power of music ("Sunday Morning on CD"). My favorite poem is "At the Millennium," in which the author "finds people nicer than / the 10 o'clock news reports" and learns that sometimes even clichés are necessary because "to be right some of the time / helps me for most of the time / when more trendy words cut me off."