A moving portrayal of heart pounding emotions on the journey to finding oneself; from deception, loneliness, longing, loss, and anguish, to love, inner peace, and new found hope, this poetry collection beautifully ilustrates the ebbs and flows of life.
Often putting the spotlight on spiritual contemplation, it touches the reader on a personal level by evoking feelings to which anyone can relate.
A moving portrayal of heart pounding emotions on the journey to finding oneself; from deception, loneliness, longing, loss, and anguish, to love, inner peace, and new found hope, this poetry collection beautifully ilustrates the ebbs and flows of life.
Often putting the spotlight on spiritual contemplation, it touches the reader on a personal level by evoking feelings to which anyone can relate.
Where Time Stands Still
Before I sleep
I pray to the Queen
And every dream
Is a message received
Where I can be anything,
Before I wake
With the sun on my face
I try my best
To maintain my rest
Until my eyes come alive,
Each new day
Is hopeful or hopeless
Depending on how I feel,
From morning till dusk
The show drones on
As I play my part,
The stage is set
With triumph or regret
Depending on how I feel,
The years go by
Into the boundless sky
Bending in time
As love draws near,
I patiently await
To see your face
And hold you tight
Through the dark nights,
In the place where time stands still.
Silent Whisper
I do hear her silent whisper,
To your ears--just a quiet, restless rustle,
But to mine:
A sweet melody, a delectable tune
playing in my ears as she whispers to me,
The tender silence broken by the soothing breeze,
How cool and refreshing her whisper is.
I do feel her soft touch,
To your senses--just the sweeping, sounding wind,
But to mine:
The elements of the atmosphere brushing against my face,
Softly brushing, leaving behind a caressing trace,
A traceless trace begotten with such ease,
How cool and refreshing it is.
Moonlight Piano
A velvet piano swings
From the frantic strings
Attached to black and white porcelain keys,
The melody dissolves into the air
So that every breath
Takes me further from the Earth,
And each sweet, resounding tune
Brings me closer to the Moon,
On the music plays
Like the seasons of marching time
Like a Sunday sunrise
Magical and divine,
Past Pluto's lonely realm
Beyond the beads of light
That filter through the night
Away from man's marring hand,
Across the celestial seas
In the depths of mysteries
Comes the sound of the piano's keys--
By the Moon's nocturnal beams.
Stefan Scortea’s collection is an interesting and ambitious one. Part of this is due to the book’s eclectic subject matter ranging from intimate renderings of relationships to politics to religion to observations of nature as well as the intersections between these items. Largely written in free verse (with occasional punctuation of elegant end-rhyme), the collection collages this myriad of meditations in a gracefully flowing sequence.
The best poems of the collection are those in which Scortea exercises an attention to the tangible, observable world as the site of reflection and transformation. In “Fishing With My Father,” a series of observations of little sequences—a dropped rock causing ripples, a frog getting into position to catch a fly—situate the speaker as witness to profound cause-and-effect in ordinary, beautiful places. The fishing line the speaker casts, an attempt to invite and participate in all of this through an intentional, agential act is interrupted by forces beyond that self that cannot be controlled: “But the pond grew cold/ As a chill came by.” Unprepared for the cold, the speaker ends the scene by telling their father “it was time to go” (26). There is a mature vulnerability to a poem like this. The speaker and the poet (and the reader) open themselves to the reality of human smallness.
That being said, some of the poems do approach “overwriting,” especially alongside the subtler and more carefully vulnerable poems in the collection. Several of the pieces run the risk of losing the reader through the speaker's elevated sense of their own poetic perspective. The poet’s careful skill as an interpreter of tangible observation does not always carry over to their treatment of abstractions like dreams and sorrow or to some of the less-grounded explorations of love.
Scortea is a promising poet. And By the Moon’s Nocturnal Beams is an enjoyable and engaging read. But it’s possible that some of the highlights are obscured by less-polished pieces. The collection might have benefited from some further editing, whittling the selection down to its strongest 25-30 pieces. Those gems—elegant in both form and treatment of the subject—could have made for a tighter, more impressive chapbook.