Blurb:
“Before the Blooming is a collection of seven years of poetry
that truly show the experience of being alive through eight unique sections,
Love, Lust, Life, Nature, Religion, Fantasy, Darkness & Death, and Etc.
Before the Blooming discusses all aspects of living through the use of poetry.
The good times, and the bad. Because in the end, everything, is an experience.”
Review:
The Piano Girl
I know a girl
Whose fingers
dance among the ivories
She stays
there all day
All night
Into the
morrow she plays,
A personal
songbird
Her proper
soul plays as if she’s carefree
All her notes
are lighthearted
But this girl
is cursed
Her heart
dances when she plays
So she plays,
And plays
Always
playing…
Doomed to
never stop
For once the
music ends,
And the
dancing ceases,
Its’ back to
painful reality
Her true love
is gone
Her keys will
remain sear
As
long as she plays,
Mind
consumed by notes and melodies,
It
has no room for his name
She
plays until her fingers bleed
All
her keys are red
Still
she’s playing
Keeping
memories at bay with her song
She
prays inside
He
will follow home her melodies
The
notes are all for him
Before the Blooming, pg. 51-52
Before the Blooming is a collection of poetry
representing seven years of a young woman's life. Poems are ordered by topic,
and cover a wide range of subjects: life and death, love and loss, serious and
whimsical. The spirit of the volume is transformative, demonstrating growth at
the endurance of life's painful lessons, and also hopeful.
I'll
confess, I don't know a great deal about poetry. I'm driven to write other
things, and usually with a great deal more wordiness than a mere poem could
hope to contain. That said, I enjoyed browsing through Bree Felling's
compendium a great deal. There is a lot to like, including a lovely cover
showing a tender blossom in the dirty hands of a gardener.
As a
mother, this nurturing image corresponds to how I often feel about my own
children—as caretaker and protector. (Of course, at other times I am a
zookeeper and the warden of an insane asylum.) It varies with the day of the week
and the moon cycle...
Bree
fully manages to capture the trials and tribulations of feminine youth. She
pours her heart into her poetry and takes the reader along on an empathetic
journey. She portrays the people in her life with passion, and my mind's eyes
painted a portrait of the individuals she wrote about. In particular, "The
Piano Girl" resonated with me, leaving me with a vivid mental image and a
profound sense of melancholy.
My
orderly tendencies wanted to regroup the poems chronologically instead of
categorically in order to make the journey linear, but I can understand why the
poet chose as she did to go with broad categories instead of a well-ordered
progression. Emotions, like life, are seldom neat.
I
would have liked to see a bit more done with the formatting—poems run onto more
than one page, leaving a lot of white space that could have been used more
efficiently. Also, I wanted more pictures, because for me, poetry and pictures
go hand in hand. The volume does contain the occasional small image but it
would have benefited from the inclusion of photographs or drawings.
Before the Blooming is a wonderful reading
choice for anyone who enjoys poetry and wishes to reconnect with a young
woman's journey to adulthood.
Find Bree on the Internet:
Buy Links:
Hi Miss Snark, I think I read on another blog/post that she started this in her teens. Do you think it is suited for a 14 year old?
ReplyDeleteHi Charlotte,
ReplyDeleteShe did start it in her teens. I do not recall anything in it that would be inappropriate for a teenage girl. Hope this helps. :)