Observations

Here is my review of Amor, a beautiful anthology of 227 poems by Ina Schroders-Zeeders, ‘about’ love’s many twists and turns.

5 Stars. Leaves the Reader Breathless and Breathing

Amor, a wandering progression of instinctively crafted poetry by Ina Schroders-Zeeders, is an intensely personal yet unselfconscious and certainly unashamed story of the author’s experience in love, creating a collection that is entertaining, imaginative, thought-provoking and full of visual and sensual detail. Exploring the questions of love and not really looking for answers, it hardly matters whether the 227 poems are about many different loves or kinds of love or many aspects of a few. Either way they seduce the reader into their immediacy and honesty with an almost hypnotic effect, blending one into another: words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters of waiting and hoping, looking and finding, coming and going, regret and remembrance.

As anyone who has followed Ina’s poetry through her blog knows, she is a prolific and eclectic writer. Her stories and reflections pour out of her ceaselessly, without any sense of urgency or pretension, as if she breathes them onto the page. I feel Ina would be a storyteller even if she wasn’t a writer – like the bards of old, she has a most natural need to `speak’ about her environment, encounters, travels, observations, emotions and memories just for the sake of sharing and encouraging others to do the same. Yet, it is obvious she is a seasoned poet: deliberate and skilled in her use of form and formlessness, knowing what works and doesn’t but never afraid to veer off the beaten path and try something new. As in life, so in art. She doesn’t let either pass by without making the most of what they have to offer for her own satisfaction and, happily, for that of her readers, too.

As in Ina’s first poetry book, ‘Veritas’, the poetry in ‘Amor’ is all the more remarkable because English is not her native language. And, once again, her kinship with the sea is evident. Even when it is not specifically mentioned, its movement, vastness and unpredictability are present in mood and outlook; these poems lapping at the shore, backwards and forwards, clinging and letting go, with low tides and high tides, winds blowing and everything stilled, the horizon seen but never completely defined.

This is a beautiful book, in its content and production. It tells a story that is circular rather than linear – well, many circles interconnecting like a chain-link, representing the cycles of beginnings and endings within the cycle of loving and living – that leaves the reader breathless yet still breathing and so wanting more.

Available in Paperback and Kindle Editions

Visit Ina’s blog!

And don’t forget to visit my Reviews for Others page (far right tab at top of blog), for my thoughts on Ina’s other lovely poetry collection, Veritas, and other novels and poetry collections.

Hope everyone has a wonderful week! Here is a different view, then Western New York has had for the last two months, of a snow drop …