Other Poems of Longing

LOCAL AUTHOR

Is it not intrusive to critique poetry? Even when feelings are not revealed, unashamed like a dying blossom from the Rose of Sharon, there is an element of unease. Juan-Paolo Perre is a poet of stature. Other Poems of Longing, his new selection, will gratify all who embraced //Carmina: The Nomad Odes//. A musician, author, an actor, still he is tempted to reach into poetry, the medium of catharsis and angst.
The poems invite no profound torment, more like a bitter sweet emotion. Surely the best, if not the most evocative, are those he composed in Rome where the universality of the of the sun’s variation reaches furthest.

The sun is less angry now
The wind blows like balm
Daylight is growing far less unreasonable….

And, more graphically,

At plain day there is this sun
But today, too, a haze

A thick, white sock.
Around the sky covering
Its wounded foot.

A handful of the poems strive to baffle: short, unmatching lines with the words like scarves we knitted as children, each row gain one-lose one stitch. The concluding False Alarm leaves a less endearing taste than Infrastructures, ‘in the form of eulogy,’ on the preceding page:

Today I was having the most halcyon
Of days when suddenly unwilled,
I thought of you.