In TWILIGHT: AWAKENING THE STARS – POEMS OF THE NIGHT’S LIGHT, author Gary W. Burns shares poetry that is short and sweet – perfect for readers who detest having to plumb the depths of verse to flesh out intricacies, marvel at its mysteries, or be literarily slain by skilled poetic prowess. This is a quick read with most poems barely extending to half the page. While there is nothing wrong with that, the academic poetry crowd will lose patience with the lightweight content, expecting a poet of such few words to strive to make each one count to its fullest measure.
Instead, what you read is what you get – snippets of pretty images of moons, stars, gardens and such, and airy tidbits of sentiment and memory that mean something to the author, though the reader is never allowed enough of a peek to decide if there is any meaning in it for them.
Take, for example, this little poem:
Into the Night
When your noisy day
Gives way
To
Quietude
Be with me
Peacefully
Greeting card verse or a plea for a high-strung lover to simmer down? It is one of several poems in which the topic feels skimmed over or under-done. Serious readers of poetry will likely want a little more meat to dig into and savor. Or at least a few more words …
Awareness
Awareness,
Boundless
Bliss
Minimalism does not get more minimal than this. But for all the limited verbosity, in today’s climate of ugly politics and rude social networking, there is an audience eager for breezy reading that is kind-spirited and disinterested in bogging down the spirit or the brain. This is a volume that delivers on those accounts, with a host of easy-on-the-eyes, easy-on-the-ears poems that, if nothing else, allows the reader to sit a spell, sip some love language and breathe.
This poem perfectly captures that concept with Burn’s hallmark economy of words:
Intentions
Brimming with intentions
Surroundings mention
Life’s a wonderful bouquet
Live life
That way
What TWILIGHT: AWAKENING THE STARS – POEMS OF THE NIGHT’S LIGHT lacks in loquaciousness will be forgiven by an audience yearning for a lightness of mind and spirit in a world that is often far too heavy to live in 24 hours a day.
While serious readers of poetry may balk at the brevity and sentimentalism of the poems in TWILIGHT: AWAKENING THE STARS – POEMS OF THE NIGHT’S LIGHT, the collection will prove a genial read to those seeking a little weightlessness in a heavyweight world.
~Libby Wiersema for IndieReader