Poems From My Bleeding Heart [Paperback]

David Rehak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 5, 2008

In this unabashedly daring and impressive collection, David Rehak displays his mastery of different forms and styles, offering us poems written in both modern and traditional ways. His poetry is as accessible, controversial, and exciting as his fiction, covering themes and subjects like romantic love and sex, death, social issues, spirituality, and everything in between, full of the author's own thoughts, ideas, fantasies, and personal life. This new bargain-priced edition is complete and unabridged, including 15 new poems.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Rehak is a musical composer / author / singer / hedonist / ascetic / iconoclast / devout believer / comedian / melancholiac / private tutor / hermit / social butterfly / scholar / philosopher. He has strong convictions but treats everything with indifference. He's a man of many faces and contradictions. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace (May 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1438215525
• ISBN-13: 978-1438215525
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,678,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Byron For A New Century, October 23, 2004

By 

Tomas Zednicek (Hluk, Czech Republic) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poems From My Bleeding Heart (Paperback)

David Rehak (b. 1980?) is a Czech-Canadian author who's talent is in early bloom like Mary Shelley, Arthur Rimbaud or our own Jiri Wolker before him. Such literary and artistic cases and rare but not unheard-of. Apparently his mother went through very difficult delivery and he was born dead for some minutes but miraculously revived. As a little boy he must have grew up hard in corruption and oppression of the Communist regime which no doubting shaped his views on freedom and censorship in adult life.The regime was giving his parents problems so they escaped to Canada. In Canada his family's fortunes improved. There he lived most his life. Now recently he is back in Europe after his university courses are interrupted due to failing health. I see him as pitiable figure, broken by nervous disorder and years of drug-use and debauchery -- probobly convalescing in some hospital or prison.

Now let me tell you about this book.....!

Wow! what a thought-provoking and brilliant and entertaining collection of poems is this by a troubled, sensitive, wise young personality torn between his base sensual impulses and his noble spiritual aspirations. It is a man who loves love, loves God, loves Good, but is burdened by overpowering temptations and knows too much about all forms of human evil, the occult, social corruption and sexual perversion, death and decay. It is like Baudelaire come back from the dead. It is like Ginsberg bitching about about life around him. It is Buk recounting his love-affairs or Eminem busting dysfunctional rhymes or rants. By writing such brutally honest and intimate and private poems, Rehak is really taking his clothes off in front of bunch of strangers and laying his heart bare. These poems are so colorful and powerful..... so phenomenal. Some of them are breath-taking. All of them are easy to understand without they being simplistic. It's a good mix of prose-poems and metrical verse. The poetic language and expression is those of a master who wish to convey interesting and witty and controversial ideas and incidents but is at same time self-conscious about being well-understood. This is the poetry book for people who hate poetry. They will easily understand each phrase. This book should also be in every contemporary poetry-lover's library. POEMS FROM MY BLEEDING HEART is a landmark work that will rank along with other fine controversial poetic masterpieces like Ginsberg's HOWL or Baudelaire's THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. It will live. Why? Because it is THAT great and it is THAT accessible. I hope in my heart his talent will get the kind of reading audience it deserves. Thank you for your time.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great deal of potential is revealed here, June 13, 2004

By 

Thomas Lapins (Orlando, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Poems From My Bleeding Heart (Paperback)

Dave had sent me some of his poems to read before I read the entire collection. His favorites were not my favorites. But after giving the book a much deserved slow read, I found many pieces of high and promising quality.

I'm a little older than Dave, twenty some years. So the youthful charms have long passed, as have the days of idealistic romance. I have settled into a quiet fire of true and deep love. So when I read some of Dave's wild fire poems, I don't click. That's not to say they're not well done.

However, when Dave hits on a subject of more mature love and intimacy, he hits a homerun. Some truly beautiful imagery and insights. His Ginsberg influence in obvious at times, but always in his own style and words. So they work and are not imitations.

His more political pieces are also quite relevant and insightful. He's very good at giving one liners that have either an afterglow or an extended shelf life of intellectual value.

Why didn't I give the book five stars? Like all poets, there are some pieces not up to par with the rest. But that's ok. I'd be happy for only a few excellent pieces, Dave's gives us many.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Confessional prose - poetry to contemplate...., April 9, 2005

By 

Laurel Johnson (Kansas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poems From My Bleeding Heart (Paperback)

David Rehak's novels are compelling, sometimes shocking, and always written in his own distinct voice. His work is often daring, skating along the edges of familiar literary concepts. This book of confessional prose poetry comes from the same place in Rehak's psyche. Nothing is too sacred or profane to be an object of his Muse. Whether rhyme, free verse, or prosaic processes, his poems run the gamut from sweet to solemn, erotic to irreverent, laced with generous doses of humor.

"On the Death of a Friend" was one of my favorites because of its offset rhyming words and the sound of it when read aloud:
Death has coiled you round him too soon
In arms as dark as the hours of the moon,
In his soft, oblivious,
cozy cocoon,
Just to prove that flesh is never impervious.

"Deceitful Age" is another favorite because of the different spin and varying poetic styles Rehak uses to make his point:
In this deceitful age,
Even liars elude shame;
And where is the public outrage
When the wrongdoer escapes blame?

Political leaders, you are failed saviors!
Political analysts, you are gloom-and-doom prophets!
Citizens, you are gullible victims!
And the world keeps spinning on its axis,
And Time keeps on ticking in the brain of its clock.

"A Noble Savage" is this poet's contemplation on the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley:
O noble savage
Of a twisted science!
You remind us of dangers
Like genetic engineering;
When man tampers with nature,
He pays an unaffordable price!

Rehak's thoughts are often morbid as he contemplates his death or the death of others. Sometimes he finds a disconcerting humor in the misbegotten misfits of a hypocritical society. And every so often lovers of poetic metaphor will be delighted, as in this excerpt from "At the Beaches of Normandy":
as soon as we hit soil, the bullets hit us,
we were like wasps in the winter
of this furious flurry of fire.
Or in this excerpt from "Autumn Rain":
And branches fearfully waved
Their every red-clad hand
Under teary-eyed clouds
And the pounding fist of thunder.

David Rehak takes readers on a whirlwind tour of his world in Poems From My Bleeding Heart. These are sometimes ribald and rollicking messages of bleeding pleading or poignant observations of hope and despair. It's David Rehak, as he is and how he thinks, as man and poet.