It took me some time to get through this and finally get around to reviewing it, not because it’s a slog to get through (far from it), but rather just due to my hectic schedule. I would like to summarize my overall thoughts about this collection with the statement that it is a reader friendly compilation.
Many people are often uncomfortable with poetry because they feel it might go over their heads or that they won’t be able to glean anything from it, but Haskin’s Past Life Invisible does not take that route. Haskin’s poems still create sensual and beautiful images with deft lyricism that a poetry connesieur can appreciate, but it never feels like it goes over the head of the average reader who enjoys the occasional poetry collection.
The poem “Wintersong” is a good example of the lyricism I spoke of. The lines “Hollow and shopworn/Praying to your god of thorns/Lonely pages torn…” have a melodic rhythm that you can easily put a beat to. In the poem “My Dark Age,” the opening stanza of “The things I now see/Inside my dark cruelty/The lines of my palms/Like red rivers running…” holds that same rhythmic quality that makes Haskin’s pieces sound like songs ready for a musician to adopt.
While many writers struggle to adequately use a traditional rhyme scheme to create poetry, Haskin uses the tool adeptly in a way that melds tradition with contemporary style.
The images throughout Haskin’s poetry are often simple, yet convey layers that leave the reading open to interpretation. Phrases like “false colors of autumn” from “Cancer Season” create a sense of vague images, and yet the reader knows exactly what the speaker means by that statement. It’s intuitive.
In “Mollytide” the speaker uses sensuous diction like “dark and decadent” or “embrace you like smoke” to create a titillating piece with words meant to be spoken between lovers, but which the speaker allows the audience to see behind closed doors.
Haskin appears to have made a conscious decision not to include punctuation (or rather sparingly) throughout all the pieces, without a single poem ending with punctuation. It conveys this sense that while every poem has a beginning, it doesn’t necessarily have an end, and feels like the speaker of each piece has drifted out of their own trailing thoughts.
However, because of this stylistic choice, the few times punctuation is used within a poem, it stands out and is jolting, coming off as typos that made it past the final editing process. The rare stray comma in a line can really stop that lyrical flow the writer so deftly created, so the inclusion of such marks should have been more carefully curated.
Overall, I think it was an excellent collection of poetry. I give it 4 out of 5 stars. If you want to delve into poetry, then this might be the place to start.
Has anyone else read this poetry collection? What were your thoughts? Let me know in the comments!