Dream Catcher by Jessica Harman

Poet Jessica Harman

Dream Catcher

Jessica Harman

Aldrich Press 2013

ISBN: 978-0615753577

　

"...As if you walked on my soul, a bed of coals-

And the fight and the raw light-..."

Dream Catcher is a song about grief and remembrance. Love lilts across each page, each poem searches for how love left, how the imprint, the foot prints, become an eagle and verbs to wear during winter:

"...Walk through me on fire. You did.

I can't believe you did and cried

When I left. Eagle feathers, I left you

With your Buddha and prayers

To Saint Martha who was supposed

To cure our poverty, an old woman

In St. Patrick's Cathedral told you.

We never got rich. Never had anything

But our mangled love, which was ugly,

When you looked at who had to do

The dishes, but which was Beautiful,

Because like asparagus and pebbles

and circles, somewhere there is our love

In its pure God form,..."

Harmon is the dream catcher. She writes poems that sift through the relationship and exposes the human aspects of love, while letting the reader experience the ethereal, the catch all. "We wept out of selfishness, because we didn't have what we wanted, and the only brief way beauty can be real." The reader gets to witness the language, the shadow on poems meant to love what was and continues to affect:

"...Saved, me like water on a forest fire-

And now the cool and hot of letting go

Begins. After your death, the prayer that let you know

That finally I had let you go your own way

Was a whisper of something ether-like

Running like a vein

Through a rock, turning, turning, turning

Into blood. The universe, the way a swatch of dark marble

Will swirl with white quartz

Remains a fragment of some special pure way..."

Love poems usually try to persuade, the reader, into a dream, as if all was perfect – plain – and in these poems we get to bite into the food offered and it is not always sweet. Often the taste reminds us there are more flavors, more than one way to love. The poems echo real:

"...Things combine, as they do, as they will,

To make something that is,

And is beautiful, just because.

It's like that now, with us.

There is nothing else."

This book must not slip through our hands without being read completely. The poems dance beyond the music, like morning sun after cloudy days.

"...It's there, though, connected in a deep web,

A fine grain, a super-subtle incantation,

A place where dream blurs and reality begins."





Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press

Reviewer: Cervena Barva Press