Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings

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Gabriela Marie Milton’s new collection of short poems and flash fiction offers a series of contemplative and intimate writings about the shifting landscape of love.

In the foreword, editor Brian Geiger describes Milton as a poet of condition versus one of profession. Her poems are unleashed as if she has exorcised them. As Milton describes in the poem “Before you came: the day of the fallen saints,” the poet becomes a traveler “into gestating dreams of no constraints.” She writes of love in all its many facets. For example, in the first poem, “The Miracle of You,” there is the exquisite transformation love can have on its subjects: “within the loneliness of you / my heart / rotates five equinoxes on a wooden spindle / your eyes pour flesh into my soul / my body germinates the sounds of growing leaves”. In the poem, “With this ring I promise you,” the poet describes love as a healing balm: “I will erase the shadows of the slave trade / locked in the heat of samba in the nights of carnival / coins put on the eyes of dead at funerals.” Then there are the poems that describe love with resentment. “What I want” describes the pain that love brings as much as it does pleasure: “what have you done to them to fall in love with you? / I rip my pain / I throw it to the waves / I raise my head / and speak to you / what do I want?” But better to be with love than without it. The poem “Lovers without love” describes them thus: “empty hearts expecting to be slaughtered.”

The poet’s dazzling images dance across the globe. There is “Love in Venice,” and from the poem, “Self-sacrifice” there are bodies “flaming mightily in the Aztec sky.” There is a “Nordic Play,” where there are the glaciers within the soul and without in the Nordic Sea. Milton imaginatively describes the space between Samos and Crete and their melting shores, and the violet sunsets lamenting the city of Granada. Readers will also get lost in love through Milton’s writings. For example, in the poem “Did you say you love me?” “The pendulum of the earth goes astray. / The North Pole disappears.”

The series transports us on a journey of love as much as it delivers us a thematically diverse set of emotions. This is a superb collection.


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Author
Star Count 4.5/5
Format eBook
Page Count 140 pages
Publisher Vita Brevis Press
Publish Date 2020-04-20
ISBN 9780578666075
Bookshop.org Buy this Book
Issue June 2020
Category Poetry & Short Stories
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