Review
Mahogany Book Club Review:
You Beckon" By Peggy Eldridge Love, is a collection of voices: A young girl, an old man, a worried wife, a soldier, a cosmopolitan and a lover as well as many others. All within the pages of this fine collection of poetry Eldridge Love handles many characters and gives them clarity and dignity that is rare in voices.
The poems work because the reader can connect with them and relate, living vicariously through their losses and victories.
The majority of Eldrdge Love poems succeed because they evoke a satisfying emotional response. It is one thing to write a well crafted poem that follows the rules of poetry, another to make a poem that touches the soul.
from " Repertoire"
I gave up wanting long ago
Believing that i bargained away
all hope of arms that might hold
eyes that could see
ears that wanted to hear
the repertoire of my soul.
Eldridge Love's poems are direct enough to draw the reader in. Complicated enough to hold the their interest. Love sports a fiskle intellect. But she doesn't put herself on a pedestal. She wants you to come into her world of words, which are often deep, always provocative and razor sharp in their brevity. Her family poem's " My Father" are snap shots of a Black girls life in Kansas who describes herself as a "hick", but don't be fooled by Eldridge Love's modesty. These poems are the documentation of a creative force at work.
Erren.G.Kelly
