Customer Reviews

Slow Fire

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A collection of poems reflecting the author's observations of the natural elements, people and inanimate objects seen as the `I', the third person or them (plural).

I can just visualise Lil in TS Eliot's Wasteland submerging from a room, naturally lit, uttering something close to:

(I)self: upstanding
(in the poem, Fore [p.46])

With the same,
`Is there such a? Hands `

sensitivity, the inquisitive tone alerting the reader to a person, uneasy and confounded by what's happening around them, quietly said yet hysterically meant.

Pamela Alexander's style is unique. The abstract is used to personify someone we know personally and at times the accent is Godlike, thunderous and fire-ry in the `I', `you' and other pronouns declared authoritively, yet subtle in the way the beauty of nature is personified, convincingly and sometimes exquisitely throughout.

On reading the poems again, it's like reading an engraved figurine being carved out of words, carefully constructed making the reader experience a glow expressed using imageries linked to the natural environment and in the persona of humans within that setting.

Each poem is shaped with her distinct voice and at times you recognise the author's typographical structure within the poems themselves.

You could read the poems again and again and feel different parts of the poem appeal to you in another way, on further reading. The reader also realises that each poem is given a lot of thought and the imagery the reader pictures in their mind's eye is carefully compact with the scenery, instruments, for instance, music, people, the social ambiance and city life. Yet all said, clearly, in neat stanzas, with the author's own way of cleverly punctuating the lines.