As you may have seen around here, I’ve been reading a lot of poetry. Well, not a lot I guess, but a lot for me. Since April is National Poetry Month, I wanted to push myself to read the poetry books I have. I tend to mainly read fiction, and one of my resolutions this year was to read more non-fiction, plays, and poetry. Maybe it was cheating saving all the poetry books I had for April. Truthfully I didn’t do much research into other poetry books or branch out from what was on my shelves. But it’s a start, right?
As you can see from my reviews, I liked the poetry collections I read, but I had a lot of trouble explaining what I liked about them. The first poetry book I reviews this year, songs we used to dance to, made me feel so haunted and melancholic in a good way. When it comes to reading, if something can elicit a strong emotion in me then that means I like it. Or maybe that isn’t right, because there have been a number of books that I’ve read that have made me angry or frustrated, eliciting a strong reaction but definitely ones I haven’t enjoyed.
It’s hard to describe something you enjoy, and with poetry collections being so short it gets even more difficult to say what it is exactly about a poem that made me like it. And writing a review just to say that this poetry collection made me feel happy, or this one made me want to cry, this one tugged at something deep inside my heart, this one made me laugh, all seems insufficient. It isn’t enough, it seems to simple, to small for how big these poems made me feel. It feels like I’m doing a disservice to them by saying so little.
But still, I believe that good poetry makes you feel, and I just have to get better at wording what those feelings are.
Sarah O'Connor 