Poems by Angele Ellis
Main Street Rag
Charlotte NC
Copyright © 2011 by Angele Ellis
ISBN: 978-1-59948-277-4
Softbound, 39 pages, $10
Review by Zvi A. Sesling
Ms. Ellis’s volume of poetry may be slim, but it is packed with punches from the opening poem “Mauches,” a polemic on ethnic prejudice that burns into any immigrant group which has contended with what Ms. Ellis experienced as a young girl. The same prejudice that exists today from liberal Massachusetts to gun-totin’ Arizona – being different or yourself does not conform to the norm.
In “Spared” good is bad, bad is good, escape (being spared) can turn nasty, can remind one of another person, while “On The Corniche, Beirut” shows the heartbreak of war,or civil war, how death comes up suddenly, how it never ends and leaves “the hole in the heart of the afternoon.”
Spared can also mean the reader is spared superfluous words, unneeded similes, unnecessary metaphors. Can it also mean being spared excess explanation or over dramatic verbiage resulting in a hollow ache inside.
While we are spared a lot in the relatively short poems, there is the feeling we would like to know more, but with good taste she lets us know in “World Of Glass” When language runs clear,/no explanation is desired.
About midway through the book you will find “Strike Sparks” an erotic homage to sex, to a lover any male would want to be, to be in that place of hot jungle love and sex, or is it all failure, all imagined, all hope or all true? Ah, Ms. Ellis can light the fire and our imagination does not want to put it out. Does she? Grab this small volume as you might her and hang on.
Thank you, Doug, for your perceptive and passionate review of Spared (part of Main Street Rag's 2011 Editor's Choice Chapbook Series). Like reading a poem, reading the perspective of another writer on one's work can seem, in your words, "...all imagined, all hope or all true..." Or all three. Thanks again!
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