Skip to main content

Evening Sun- A Widow's Journey by Aline Soules (poetry chapbook)

Evening Sun: A Widow’s Journey is a poetry chapbook by Aline Soulesl
Review by Carol Smallwood
Andrew Benzie Books (May 29, 2014) 38 pages, $3.79
Aline Soules’ work has appeared in journals, e-zines, and anthologies such as The
MacGuffin, Literature of the Expanding Frontier, Kenyon Review. She earned an MA in English, MSLS in Library Science, and an MFA in Creative Writing.
Recently I had the good fortune of reading dozens of books as one of the judges in a national poetry contest but none had the timely theme of widowhood: actuary tables state women live longer than men and our own observation bears this out. The chapbook, Evening Sun: A Widow’s Journey by Aline Soules, opens with “Changing Direction” and closes with “Notes VII;” the twenty-nine poems are dedicated to her husband, Donald Keith Soules (1944-1999). Poems from her chapbook have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in such journals as Shaking Like a Mountain, The Houston Literary Review.
One of the strengths of the chapbook is that Soules uses everyday activities such as
washing dishes and grocery shopping to show the loss of her husband with such depth and poignancy that readers immediately relate. Loss and grief are some of the universals we must all figure out how to deal with and readers can understand the experience even if it is not a spouse. In the poem, “Things I Need to Tell You. Questions I Want to Ask” is the memorable stanza:
I tried to give away your baseball glove,
a first baseman’s I discovered
(did you tell me that?), but it’s left-handed
and the boy who’d love to have it is a righty.
Remembering places where one has been with loved ones is often done. Soules recalls time on Lake Erie, “an inland sea with no tide/water lapping over and over.” In another poem they are on a river: “You dip your paddle/to turn the canoe. I lay mine across my knees/”. In the poem, “Winter Walk, Hoapili Trail” the couple walk on a lava road in Hawaii: “our feet slip on loose black rocks/sounding like cutlery shifting in a drawer./”
Soules’ poems are not long and captures pathos with economy and elegant craftsmanship without sentimentality or overtones of complaint. The poems are not the longer narrative prose poems that appear in her Mediation on Woman. Various locations such as Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Meadow Brook Festival in Michigan, Death Valley in California, and famous musicians such as Ravel, Horowitz, Dvorak help shape the chapbook that shares with the reader a widow’s journey/personal elegy, in the carefully selected lyrical and understated free verse poems.
Reviewer Carol Smallwood. Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Picket Fences (Lamar University Press 2014); Writing After Retirement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching, is on Poets & Writers Magazine list of Best Books for Writers.

Review by Carol Smallwood 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MARGARET FIELAND INTERVIEW (guest blogger)

When did you first know you were destined to be a writer? LOL, I never realized I was destined to be a writer -- I fell into it. I'd written poetry for years, collecting it in notebooks stacked in my attic when I wrote one I wanted to keep. This led me to several online sites and ultimately to discovering the Muse Online Writers Conference where I hooked up with Linda Barnett Johnson and joined her writers forums. She required everyone to write both fiction and poetry, so, with much trepidation, I started writing fiction. Then I got hooked on it, wrote a chapter book, took the ICL course and actually learned how to write it. Then in 2010, I was seized by a desire to write a sci fi novel, so I spent six weeks or so on world building, mostly, with a bit of plotting thrown in for good measure. Who would you cite as your influences? I'm a way-back sci-fi fan, and Robert A. Heinlein influenced me heavily. I took a lot away from his writing, notably the value of surpris
6 comments
Read more

A Tip for Authors: What to Put on the Back Cover of a Book

If you have accomplished the arduous task of writing a book, you may not embrace the job of choosing what to put on your book's back cover. Maybe you think that a short biography, along with a few endorsements should suffice. Actually the material on the back cover can carry out its intended job, without the presence of a two or three line bio. It does pay to highlight any endorsements you have received from experts within the industry, or from recognized members of government or society. Still, you may not have on file an endorsement that can stir up the emotions in a potential reader. Yet you have little reason to hope that the reader of the rear covering piece will elect to look at the pages between the covers, if you fail to trigger that same person's emotions. With that fact in mind, you must consider what emotions might push a book lover to purchase the publication that bears your name. Maybe that potential reader feels challeng
Post a Comment
Read more

Those S and ES Endings by Mary Deal

These endings have always troubled me until I finally decided to get it right. Compare the versions and pick out the correct usages in this name ending with the letter s . The Joneses came for dinner. The Jones’s came for dinner. The Jones came for dinner. John Joneses car stalled. John Jones car stalled. John Jones’s car stalled. That Jones’s girl. That Joneses girl. That Jones girl. The correct sentences are: The Joneses came for dinner. John Jones’s car stalled. That Jones girl. Some tips: When a name ends with an s, and when speaking of the family as a group, add es , as in Joneses. When speaking about something John Jones owned, it is his property and, therefore, an apostrophe and s shows ownership, as in Jones’s . When speaking about a person in the singular, use only the name Jones. However, when speaking about a group of girls all named Jones, you would write that sentence: The Jones girls . Notice that the name stays
2 comments
Read more