Poetry review: Understanding the season

The rhythm of Many Seasons is a collection of poems that capture the different ebbs and flows or the vicissitudes of life. It is divided into seven seasons; the season of love and hate, life and death, confusion and clarity. Others are hope and doubt, pleasure and pain, and diverse seasons of many rhythms.

The first thing that strikes you is the contrast of the ideas in each division of the collection of poems. These poems are a season of antithesis, and this season runs freely like a playful child through the first division of the poem, Love and Hate.

The first poem in the series, ‘Fear of Love’, paints a tumultuous picture of love that runs contrary to the popular idea of love as a thing of delight, or even a safe place for the expression of passion. However, the images that phrases like ‘painful blow’, and ‘piercing the tender heart’ evoke speak otherwise.

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‘In when fate decides,’ the second poem in the Love and Hate series, the poet warns lovers to study the seasons of love in order to avoid pains:

‘Remember to study love’s season,

For that will save you from pains.’

Despite the pains and tears that the poet warns lovers to beware of, some poems still explore the other side of love that makes you feel like the sun rises and sets at your feet inLove and Hate. A particular poem that captures this mushiness is ‘Your Magical Touch:’

tender loving gaze

prelude to a lovely play

my heart now you stole

your magical tender touches

transport me to paradise

The next division, Season of Life and of Death’ explores death and life from existential lens. In the poem, No One is Promised Tomorrow, the poet explores the inevitability of death.

Today is the only certainty we know,

No one is promised tomorrow.

Today, we may be full of health,

Tomorrow, we may be face to face with death.

In Confusion and Clarity, the poet tries to gain understanding through a series of rhetorical questions that show the confusing state of affairs in the speaking voice’s environment. The poet laments the killings of brothers by brothers and asks when peace will find its way to this land. Therefore, the rhetorical questions express the confusion in the land, while the poet hopes clarity will come in form of answers to these questions.

The poet is full of epigrams on hard work in the Season of Success and Failure, while the Season of Hope and Doubt explores the road to expectation in the twists and turns of doubts. ‘Shattered Hope’ is a poem that captures what happens to dashed hopes.

What happens to a shattered hope?

Does it break into pieces

like a broken glass?

Or gather wings like a bird

And then fly away?

Does it burst like a deflated balloon

or shine brightly and beautifully,

like a full moon?

Season of Pleasure and Pain reads like a continuation of Season of Love and Hate.

Letting Go, a poem in this season, explores child abuse in form of sexual violation. This season also explores the theme of death on a personal level and extols the qualities of the deceased. The last division, Diverse Seasons of Many Rhythms, is a smorgasbord of seasons. It captures various themes that do not fall into the neat divisions of opposites like love and hate or pleasure and pain.

Rhythm of Many Seasons is a work with a refreshing voice, exploring themes that are easy to relate with by readers. The poetic vision of the writer also calls for deep reflection about life and death and vanity.

Most of the poems are a call to arms in respect to different areas of life that need reflection.  The poet has also done well in presenting themes with the help of structural antithesis in six of the seven seasons of the collection.

Generally, the language of thework is accessible, sometimes to a fault

Finally, Rhythm of Many Seasons is a work in progress and with many prospects for artistic brilliance and creativity if more attention is given to style, language and imagery.