John D. Robinson started writing poetry in his mid-teens and has never stopped. Heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a teen, he embarked on a decades long odyssey, experiencing homelessness, hunger, and crime. But life is never all bad, and John also found joy and love and never lost his sense of compassion. Robinson's poetry collection The Absence & Other Poems gets to the heart of our strongest emotions. It explores them regardless of the pain they hold to address the simple yet profound act of remembering the past.

The titular poem, The Absence, hits you with every word of a love lost and the yearning to go back to when things were not necessarily better but more bearable.

These are poems of the past, the absence of what was, but can never be recovered. The Absence and a handful of other poems in the collection reveal the lost and hard love of a woman who struggled with addictions and the pain of loving someone who is beyond saving.

There are also several poems about the creative process of writing poetry. In The Poem of Pen and Paper and Ink, John Robinson writes about the apprehension before you write. What is so thought provoking about the poem is that it isn't the writer or even the pen that is hesitant, but the paper yet to be written on. The pen is the one that is fearless with its infinite possibilities.

The Absence and Other Poems is not simply a collection of separate poems, but interconnected in a way that slowly paints a faint picture of the author. With each poem you gain additional details, like a mystery is unfolding. The poem To Myself, Robinson reflects on all the people he has been over the years. He doesn't want just one image of himself because it wouldn't be accurate. I think we can all relate to this in a way that changing is a natural part of life and so is reflecting on it.

John D. Robinson's collection of poems is a true testament of its craft and should not be missed by readers of poetry.

.