A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival

In lyrical prose, flowing words and unique definitions A Concerto for an Empty Frame tells the story of love, loss, and heartbreak in a collection of poems. As with most poetry, not everything is clear cut to define, but with a little thought and study it is not hard to interpret, making it a good book to start with if you are only starting to read poetry.

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios takes you through a journey of love, despair, loss, grief and, eventually, healing through mathematics, biology and pondering on identity. The whole book is an emotional roller-coaster of life, family, and finding one’s self that makes you look at your life as well as those around you in a different way.

Another strong theme of the book is an empty frame; though this is much more subtle. In the same way, an empty frame has the potential to display artwork, our lives are each an empty frame that we must fill and whether it is full of heartbreak, love, or a collection of emotion, it is whatever potential beauty you want to put into it. Or maybe it is a doorway to walk through and discover everything hidden deep in your heart.
I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting when I opened this collection, but I was under the impression, mostly by the title and description, that the poems would come together to form a kind of classical musical score and it took me several tries before I finally understood how it is indeed in this format. My favorite poems included mostly the definitions of certain musical notation, taking the literal definition and then twisting them into poetic images that still make sense.

Some poems are long, and some are short, giving an overall good pace so the book can be read in one sitting or over time. However, I do recommend reading the whole book before going back and studying each individual poem, as it is a journey from cover to cover that flows together to tell a story. They can be read as individual poems, but there is a lot lost without the others surrounding it.

Even though some of the poems I liked better than others, there were none I truly disliked and most were easy to understand and did not leave me confused and wondering what it could possibly be about. If you love poetry or musical scores, this collection will not disappoint.