Publisher: Publish America, July 2005

ISBN: 1-4137-8170-5

The following review was contributed by: Richard Crowhurst

Christine Lopez begins her substantial collection by saying, ‘Poetry was my therapy and remains my healing garden’. She finishes, 190 pages later, by thanking her readers for believing in her. I have to say that, having read these raw emotional poems, I certainly believe in her, but I also have mixed feelings about the book.

The collection describes events that most of us, thankfully, struggle to imagine. Nobody could deny the creative opportunities from such a life. It’s clear from the start that writing poetry has been a therapeutic process for Christine, and this is the first problem. As someone who suffers bouts of depression I know how comforting this type of poetry can be to write. However, as a professional writer I also know that much of it should never be subjected to the glare of a wider readership. Some of the material in this book seems too raw and juvenile to allow an emotional connection by the reader. These poems, at first, undermine the better poems, and, make no mistake; the good is very good. However, when you learn that Christine has drawn from a body of work that she began at eleven, the juvenile quality becomes a positive in some cases.

This said, throughout the book my sympathy for the author was constantly interrupted by thinking that she needed the services of a good editor. There are hundreds of poems here, from single sentences broken over a few lines, to long uninterrupted pieces. The effect would have been stronger if three quarters of them had been discarded and the reader left to focus on, and contemplate, the best. We all make mistakes, me included but the danger of typos and spelling errors creeping into a book like this, is that they will undermine the message. This is exactly what happens in ‘Puppet-Master’ on page 47.

“I’m bazaar, and still you welcome me”.

After this you struggle to read a powerful poem about abuse as seriously as you should. There are also some lines that, to me, just shouldn’t be there. On the very next page in ‘Hemomania’, Ms Lopez gives us:

“Pain liquefies the icicles

That have been weaned

Off my heart’s titty”.

I also struggled to cope with the lack of proper punctuation and repeated use of the same, tired, metaphors. Full stops and periods are quite acceptable in poetry, even modern verse and without them the effect of the longer pieces is too relentless. The reader loses any sense of pace and so the words lose their impact. ‘Hemomania’ is also a good example of this. I also lost count of the number of times seeds were sown, plants planted and swords double-edged throughout the book. Given the subject matter, the use of these is understandable, but the effect would be far less noticeable if the collection wasn’t so long.

Pieces like Legacy moved me to tears and there is real power here. But the overall effect is weakened by the size and inconsistent quality of the collection. I also struggled to sift the less important memories from the severe, disturbing and moving ones. I constantly wanted to know more and, should Christine Lopez ever write a memoir or biography, I’d be first in the queue to read it. These collected verses left me distinctly lukewarm however. The best pieces repay numerous re-readings; the worst barely warrant the first one. To use a cliché, this book, like the Curate’s egg, is (very) good in parts.