Melody Murray's Books

I am wrestling with how to review this book. I think there is valuable information here, albeit presented in an inexplicably popular, but to my eye unnecessary, format. I think that I can't get past the format to accurately assess the merits of this book, but I can tell you that I hated it.I think I hated it because poetry means so much to me, poetry is the beat of my heart and the solace of my days. Real poetry has power like no other words have power. It can topple governments, inspire impossible acts or just make one walk out into the ocean, never to return. Real poetry is made of gunpowder, it's made of dreams, and it is the sacred incense of my secular life. Real poetry has picked me up out of my quotidian life, spun me around and slammed me into the sand so hard my sternum ached for weeks and I was unable to turn around without my eyes filling with tears when I heard a loved one's voice. When my heart is sore, I turn to poetry. When I am lost and bereft, there's a book of verse in my hand and another in my pocket. When everything is exquisitely right, there is a poem singing about that rightness just under my clavicle. Poetry moves in my blood and stiffens my bones. Poetry informs every breath I take.Perhaps you might say I'm a little too close to the topic to be objective.Novels in free verse are the Catholic Mass in English. Novels in free verse are Bowdler's Shakespeare for women and children. Novels in free verse are weak, puling things, neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, and the list of the ones that are not is very, very short. Cynthia Rylant made it work, but she made it work by shoehorning real poetry into the form, rather than the opposite. This book has a straightforward story to tell, or rather, three straightforward stories to tell. Casting them in free verse was gratuitous. There are three distinct books here, books that could be rich and nourishing, but what's served up instead is the thin broth of free verse, or of wordsarranged on pages insort of a poetical looking fashionwhich helps one speed throughand adds nothing to the story.