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This book of just under one hundred poems is divided into about eleven parts, beginning with the author’s marriage in 1958 to his wife for the next fifty-nine years. The first few sections are short—featuring love letters between them—usually a page or two in length. The series of rhyming poems then proceed into sections covering “cycles of life”—or nature poems—then into poems describing his newborn children, Deborah and Howie. A short venture into ecological poems then shifts into the poet’s musings about his thoughts about God, fate, and philosophical ideas. His daughter Deborah’s death from cancer at age thirty-eight is the next theme, with very sad and moving poems about the parents’ sense of loss. A short series of poems about senior citizens is then followed by the longest section called “Humorous, Silly, Thoughtful,” which features the author’s musings on aging.
The poems are artfully composed, with a steady rhythm throughout them established by the rhyming of the first and last lines of the stanzas. The material is quite varied in both content and effect, with light-hearted and ironic passages about aging and marriage set against the pathos and tragedy of their daughter’s premature death. There is quite a bit of nature imagery in the poems, no doubt due to the author’s residence in Lake Barrington Shores, Illinois. His honest reflections about the existence of God and how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with such a supposed benevolent being is a universal theme that he serves well with a lighthearted yet serious approach. There is an inherent musicality in the verse form of this book, a trait which he amplifies in one sixty-five verse poem, “Remember the Vinyls,” composed entirely of song lyrics. Schwartz’s collection is a commendable effort.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review