Thursday, January 23, 2020

Review of The Drum That Beats Within Us by Mike Bond

Read for: 2020 Additions

Synopsis: "First published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in City Lights Books, Mike Bond is an award-winning poet, critically acclaimed novelist, ecologist, and war and human rights journalist. Based on his own experiences in many dangerous and war-torn regions of the world and in its last wild places, his poems and novels portray the innate hunger of the human heart for good, the intense joys of love, the terror and fury of battle, the sinister conspiracies of dictators, and corporations and politicians, and the beauty of the vanishing natural world."

My Review: I was drawn to this book by the cover, it reminds me of home so much! Like all poetry collections, it was really hit and miss for me. I actually almost gave up but pushed through and discovered poems I liked more towards the end of the book. I was expecting a lot of poems around nature and Native Americans and while there were a few of those, there were also many focused on city life and other countries. There wasn't the connection and flow throughout the whole book as I had hoped, at times I would start to see a connection between the poems only to come across one that didn't quite fit with the others. While I appreciate poems that stand on their own, but when I purchase a book like this I am looking more for poems to have some cohesiveness throughout the book. While some really resonated with me, overall this collection wasn't what I was expecting or looking for at this time.

My Rating: I am a little disappointed that this was my first purchase of the year and one of only limited books I can pick up this year.  I guess in the future I will have to be a little more cautious with my poetry collection purchases as this one didn't deliver what it appears is promised.  I give it a rating of One Paw and a Stump Wag!

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