Where Love is Found
by Jessica Herr
Trafford Publishing

book review by Omar Figueras

Jessica Herr's poetry is a collection of self-reflective meditations whose themes include observations of nature, moments of peace, and flashes of overcoming heartache and despair. The author blends dots of archaic language with contemporary phrases and mixes simple rhyme schemes with free verse. Images of stars, evening and morning skies, distant mountains tops shrouded with rainstorm clouds, all harking to the main drives of the author's work: hope confronting fear, as well as fear in the face of hope.

Some of Herr's verse reflects religious themes, imploring God for strength to survive the trials of life, beseeching Heaven with prayers, requests for enlightenment, and the lifting of the human spirit up to the divine. The narrating voice in one of the pieces, "Come Little Baby," consoles a young loved one, coaxing this child out of the dark and into the light. "Changes" describes the crossing of physical terrain as a metaphor for traversing psychological ground, moving forward in life, and adapting to shifts in topography as while moving inland, finding footing and stability in the world. Outside of the thematic scope of the remainder of the collection, "Freedom" focuses on soldiers and war, out of the ordinary in subject matter to set alongside others whose unifying themes are those of peace, love, and forgiveness. Perhaps it was the author's intention to jolt her audience into acknowledging that war and peace are symbiotic and exist side by side as two halves of the same coin.

Kerr's work keenly reflects a sense of loss and self-healing, a reparation of character, identity. and personality; however, the narrator of most of the pieces uneasily misses the focus of desire despite having made leaps in bounds dealing with the initial loss. The voice looks forward with a hopeful eye, but like Lot's wife, it turns back to see what was left behind, without the slightest fear of turning into salt.

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