Customer Reviews

Being Full of Light, Insubstantial

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I've been enjoying this collection over the past couple nights, but I know that I'll be pulling it out in the future to savor its pieces again, at a less frenetic pace, a little at a time. Addison has an amazing lyrical sense, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images -- like a mundane house cleaning list and the necessary ingredients to passion and a healthy life -- in one taut, no-syllable-wasted poem.

Sometimes it's not even a whole poem so much as one really amazing image evoked in just one stanza that grabs -- like in "Interuption," where I absolutely love the opening -- "In my mouth Lies wait quietly to advise the Dreams." Gorgeous!

Or (from another piece): "she filled her mouth with the shadows of his words."

Or "My womb moans with the ghost of the broken structure both emptied, we wait to be torn down" from "The Barn" -- a chilling image, deftly woven.

I think my favorite may be "River Share" though, with its melancholic romanticism: "We share the same soul/even as our breath moves separately/two billion exhales, inhales/the River runs beneath our skin." I've gone back to read it twice. As I intend to do with all of these short but very substantial poems.

Bring some of this Light into your heart!

A poignant romp through the layered universe of Linda Addison's prose. You skip, twirl, pause, cuddle up, and dance through the pages. The poems are refreshingly varied, yet together they communicate a unique sensation of foreboding and exhilaration. While swimming through her powerful images of the past, present, lost, longed for, and imagined, I couldn't help enjoying my lightness of being.

Being Full of Light, Insubstantial is a poetry book that will take the willing reader to the edges of the universe. The boundaries of time and space are explored and transcended by the words in this collection.

Addison has a way of expressing the concrete with the same clarity as she does the abstract. A perfect example of this ability is the poem entitled "Mp3 Zen Buddhists". She breaks down the concept of our relationship with our mp3 players - to achieve a state of thoughtlessness by drowning out the world with a noise of our choosing. Intertwining phrases like "meditation of the 21st Century" with "state of no-mind complete with a flick of a switch" contrives a subtle understanding to a current phenomenon.

Another example of Addison's talent to press the concrete and abstract together until they are one and the same is the poem "The Adventures of a Ghetto Child". She gives the reader the imagery needed to experience the imagination of a child while at the same time describing the harsh realities of living in an impoverished environment.

Addison's poems also bring out images of a person struggling to chip away the confining nature of our modern times in order to go back to a spiritual existence that is the basis of life. It's interesting to see how a person caught up in the hustle and bustle of life in the city tries to look past the now into the prehistory of human life. In "River Share", she writes "We share the same soul even as our breaths move separately/two billion exhales, inhales the River runs beneath our skin". Dancing takes Addison back to a primal past in "Belly Dancer" as she begins the poem with the following passage, "Gathering fire and wind earth and air to spark along the edges of my hips, fingers and waist".

Linda D. Addison has a mesmerizing control of the language and effortlessly re-constructs the past, present and future giving the reader to something digest and ponder. The beginning of this review mentions the "willing" reader. Only a person with an open, hungry mind can truly visualize the subliminal mission of this poetry collection - to expand the experience of the beholder.

Joey Pinkney
C & B Book Reviewer