A Few Forms of Love Richard Brostoff

 A Few Forms of Love

Richard Brostoff

Finishing Line Press

$14.00

Review by Rene Schwiesow

Richard Brostoff is a psychiatrist who finds that writing poetry in the morning enables him to return to his office in the afternoon with his mind “more fluent and at ease with trope.”  He feels that his writing helps him to better address another’s wilderness.

What better way to address his readers’ wilderness than through forms of love?  Erich Fromm, the German psychologist and philosopher stated:  “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”  Brostoff’s poems on love speak to the love of nature and to the love and loss of an other.

In “Green Song” Brostoff combines nature and human love as he often does throughout the book:

I miss the swampland of our wanting

where a low lit creature crawls

by stealth

reptilian in my veins.

“Beneath a Storm” takes a look at Valentine’s Day, showing us that romance can be found even in the ordinary moments coveted during a winter snowfall.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and in the early light

at six a.m. I am dozing by your side.

Other men will rush to buy their wives

red hearts of cinnamon, carnations bunched

with baby’s breath, red lacey cards.

I buy you white pajamas

of fine Egyptian cloth,

not certain what the color means.

When Brostoff talks of loss and grief he is fluid and we can see the beauty even in the melancholy.  In “Canyon”

Grief finds, like water, slow erosions,

cascading

drifts and stammerings

and wears things down

in geological time, transforming

what it touches

making us what we are,

layered as the canyons forms,

both beautiful and sad.

The work entitled “Grief” ends with a blockbuster three lines:

You hold an absence

at your center,

as if it were a life.

If the question is what is love?  Then Brostoff has, indeed, given us a satisfactory answer.

***Rene Schwiesow is co-host of the popular South Shore venue The Art of Words in Plymouth, MA.  She writes a monthly column for the arts in Plymouth’s Old Colony Memorial.