FeaturedPoetry

SOME NOTES YOU HOLD

By

Loved it! 😍

Poignant words linger, shared memories haunt, sadness, and joy co-mingle; truth lays out, opened, garden to the forest, the heart of a home.

A three-sectioned approach to a life lived both forward and in reverse. Covering sacred ground of memories bittersweet, melodies of high and low notes well played.


This collection of poetry contains verses you will want to revisit. Lines of brilliance, rising up from nature; a stillness that begets being, and in the being of stillness you learn both what you did not know and are reminded of all you have always known.


A mourning, a seeing, a questioning; a leaning into, a celebration, a gift; nature whispers of the eternal, rebirth that comes around, while human life is but vapor.


You will come to know the author and members within her family. You will be brought to Appalachia and learn to breathe it in. You will appreciate how hard it would be to be a man among women learning what it is to be a man. Trying to earn praise, recognition, and the pride of the fathers long dead.


A way of living that collects, lives beneath its means, almost to a fault and yet faultless. Simple complicated beauty. The pieces of people that make them memorable and how you realize we are all unique. A hole left when someone dies that cannot be filled by another and that's why we memorialize.


I appreciate the poetry found within the first section of "Letting Go" the most. As a stand-alone, I would have rated this section as five-star perfection. I found the second section, "Interlude: Selah", to be slightly more abbreviated lengths of thread tied together within music and song but otherwise slightly disconnected and disjointed from the rest. As it very well may have been intended and yet I wished the break away from one section wasn't quite so pronounced and that there was a closer continuation of story twined throughout. With the third section of "Holding On" bringing everything back together again to a satisfying conclusion although far from the end.


The above being said, there was one particular poem that stood out for me within the second section of "Interlude: Selah": No. 34, "Fiddler's Suite". It's the imagery coupled with the heart, spirit, and truth; inspired, inspirational, and inspiring.


For those who love poetry, for those who enjoy reading between lines, for those who like thinking deeply; for those who appreciate the universality of emotion, for those who have lived beyond their first twenty-five years and are into their next, may this book's words envelop you!

Reviewed by

Reading books and writing reviews brings with it every emotion under the sun; forever changing, forever changed, and I wouldn't have it any other way. May my words not only help fellow readers but also the authors of the books we read.

About the author

Rita Quillen’s new novel WAYLAND, a sequel to HIDING EZRA, is published by Iris Press in fall, 2019, and her new poetry collection SOME NOTES YOU HOLD is due out from Madville Press in 2020. She lives, farms, writes songs, and takes photographs at Early Autumn Farm in southwestern Virginia. view profile

Published on October 22, 2020

Published by Madville Publishing

10000 words

Genre: Poetry

Reviewed by