Evocative and beautifully haunting…
Hollow uses speculative poetry to transcend a heartbroken lover’s grief in his haunting debut, a collection of short poems. Set against a haunted house backdrop, the collection comprises a sequence of poems, containing fragments from the life of a grieving widower. With his partner dead, the unnamed protagonist struggles beneath the weight of prolonged grief and longing. The book begins with the hauntingly beautiful “Films About Ghosts”: “It’s so hard/ watching you disappear/ like a reel of film/ being gradually exposed/ until each frame is only white fog/ erasing all your exquisite details” and moves further to enact the protagonist’s struggles to find a medium to help him conjure his lover: “are you in here? / please answer me/ you’re getting fainter/ is that your voice/ coming from downstairs? / speak up/ I can’t hear you.” Visceral, disturbing, and deeply evocative, these poems detail devastating accounts of grief: “I know where you are/ Laying in the sigh of stars/ in the back of an abandoned car/ humming the song of the sea/ waiting for me/ to meet in our reverie,”, and end on a morbid and yet buoyant note: “sleep well/ tired heart/ the deep spell/ and cries heard afar.” The accompanied illustrations evoke both the complex multiplicity of the protagonist’s emotions and the ominous setting. The collection adeptly gives voice to pain and despair of a man struggling with the death of his partner. But what makes this collection truly revelatory is its bold envisioning of a haunted house and a love that goes beyond the realm of living: “burnt/ bricks and bones/ burnt faces in our loft/ ashes over my eyes/ and lips/ let me taste your cinders/ and remind me how it burns/ to love you.”
Welcome Home Little Poltergeist
By Vincent Hollow
Writers Republic LLC
Pub date December 25, 2020
ISBN 978-1637281246
Price $2.21 (USD) Kindle edition, $13.99 Paperback
