Life: The Beautiful Struggle
John E. Deleo
Review by Alyce Wilson
Life: The Beautiful Struggle starts out with a series of reflections, which are aphorisms, such as "Being clever is not a virtue, but it can buy you time." Some of them are simply turns on famous sayings, such as "A mind is a terrible thing to have.".
While many of these reflections sound vaguely familiar, none of them are particularly quotable or memorable in themselves. It's uncertain why the writer and his contributing editor, Gary A. Wroblewski, chose to include them.
John J. Deleo's poems are more of the same: bland musings about a variety of topics, such as "Perfection":
I may write all day
and not find the ideal words.
Thus we search for perfection
In a world that is full of flaws.
substituting passion for love,
Opinion for fact, material things
for that which really matters.
A lack of distinctive word choices or poetic techniques makes the short poems indistinguishable from the aphorisms that precede them, except for the length. It's almost as if Deleo's goal were simply to record his accumulated life's wisdom.
However, many of his insights and conclusions seem self-explanatory, such as these lines from "The Words of Friends": "The words spoken between friends / become the framework of lasting affection."
His poems are better when he steers away from abstraction and finds a focus. His best poem, "Emily Dear," addresses a very specific subject, poet Emily Dickinson.
Emily, dear,
the ease by which you penned your poems
leaves me breathless and adoring.
For try as I might, the energy to write
even one good line makes me appreciate
the treasure of thought and expression you were!
And gives this restless poet pause
in search of rhyme without flaw.
Genuine sentiment comes through here, although the poem would be improved through more specific, descriptive language and through an attention to poetic techniques. DeLeo would do well to spend more time analyzing the Dickinson poems he admires, to learn how she made her thoughts come alive.
For some reason, a few poems by Gary A. Wroblewski appear in the back of the book. It's unclear how these poems fit into the whole.
Where Deleo's poems are simple, Wroblewski opts for longer, more complicated lines, which are equally abstract, such as in "The Enemy": "Who is the enemy, hidden, mysterious? / Cause of all strife, rants, growing tight fisted, / Spreading the globe with torment, so insidious. / Continent of the cross, uprooted, thrown and twisted."
While Wroblewski pays more attention to poetic techniques such as the use of rhyme and an attention to the music of the language, he would benefit form finding a focus, a central image or thought, around which to build his poems. He needs to draw the reader into the poem, to move from the abstract to the concrete.
Both poets should read more poetry, to learn how poets accomplish their
goals. Enrolling in a writing workshop would help them learn new techniques
for crafting poems, so they can express, more vividly and effectively,
their insights on life.
Self-published chapbook, Dade City, Florida (jjdeleo2003@yahoo.com)