Customer Reviews

House Without a Dreamer (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize Library)

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This is, without a doubt, one of my favorite books of recent poetry. Among her many other talents, AHB cleverly recasts fairy tales, without falling victim to Adrienne Rich's tendency to find mythology in everything, and her poetic felicity goes far beyond ironic versions of folk wisdom. She'll teach you about pain and aging, yet her profundities don't ring pedantic. She'll humor you without sacrificing her poetic integrity. I cannot say enough in praise of her craft. Too many writers continue to pass off broken prose as poetry, yet AHB pays close attention to line and teases you with occasional amphibolic turns of phrase. Her emotional insight into relationships and her ability to render those relationships with candor makes her poetry familiar, yet she achieves this without sacrificing the strength of her subversive moments. This book is a joy to read again and again.

House Without a Dreamer is a delightful collection of beautiful musings on ordinary, daily life. The poems themselves deal with simple things, and the words are simple, and read and flow effortlessly from the mouth. They speak of love, married love, making love, decades together; sometimes this love goes sour and marriages become broken but companions remain together. They speak of passion and youth. They reveal Budy's profound appreciation for and personal relationship with the earth, with living things, the sky, the sunrise. They also capture glimpses of cherished people in her life. A button between cracks in the ground becomes a story because it was found and taken in and treasured. A velvet jacket is the dark sky, a jacket that hangs in her mother's closet, that she would find as a child in the dark closet and feel safe. I love these poems because they are so unassuming, so real and human. I feel like I could be the "I" whose words I am reading. Some of them make me wish I were that poet, telling those stories and bearing those memories. The final poem, "Dawn," was one that took hold of me with particular force because of how it told of Budy's closeness with what I ignore most days because I "have no time": sunrise, the intangible passing of time, "the precise moment/ today became yesterday;/ tomorrow, today." The watching and waiting described in this poem, a repeated endeavor, reminds me of what I wish I could do myself: to live a life in which what is so precious and beautiful is cherished for what it is.

Budy's poems take us places, within familiar surroundings, we haven't really been before, or try hard to deny acknowledging. Budy unswervingly engages all that is human and mystical in our time. She can inspire the beasts of the jungle and the chicekens themselves to dance!

Andrea Hollander Budy's remarkable talents are put on display in her first full-length collection of poems entitled House Without a Dreamer. From grief to change and heartache to passion, Budy is able to conjure up many emotions. Each poem within the collection has the power to make a reader truly think, to submerse herself further than the surface.

I was truly impressed with how simplistic and unadorned her writing could be, yet the meanings behind the words were so deep and emotional. She was able to display this in many of her poems. In particular, I found the poem "What I Will Be When I Cannot Be With You" to be very poignant and relatable. As well, I found the poem "Grief" to be very moving. In this poem, she expresses how grief is like the cave in one's dream. The person submerses herself in the pain, diving deeper and deeper. Over time, it appears as those the pain has faded away, yet this is a trick. Instead, the pain becomes an intrinsic part of her; it becomes "a secret place,/ and you have learned/ to breath in it." Throughout her writings, Budy draws on nature. Whether mentioning the moon, sun, beach, or woods, she is able to place a vivid picture in the reader's mind and trigger their thinking. I especially loved her usage of nature in the poem "Trying to Explain." "It is a dry abandoned shell, a house/ without a dreamer, and I,/ who dream all the time/ and remember so little, do not/ put it back."

Although I consider myself to know little of poetry and avoid reading them, I was completely blow away by Budy's work. I found myself enlightened by her reading, especially during a time when I need it the most. Overall, I recommend everyone to buy House Without a Dreamer and submerse themselves in her work.