Title: Welcome Home Little Poltergeist
Author: Vincent Hollow
Publisher: Writers Republic LLC
ISBN: 9781637281246
Genre: Narrative Poetry
Pages: 234
Reviewed by: Barbara Bamberger Scott
Pacific Book Review
“I can’t stop resurrecting you
filling vial upon vial
with elixirs of your evanescence
conjuring up your essence in nocturnal spells”
Welcome Home Little Poltergeist
Poet and illustrator Hollow has composed a lasting memorial to a lost love in this poignant collection of poems and pictures. The goal is to capture something of the remaining feeling for a departed lover, beginning with the plaint, “It’s so hard watching you disappear,” “my eyes straining for one last glimpse” (“Films About Ghosts”). He admits in “Nobody Home” that though “paranormal sighting” is “always inviting,” he knows in his heart that “there’s nobody home.” Yet he continues to experience fleeting glimpses of the spirit of his lost love: “a pile of clothes tossed on an office chair keeps pretending to be you”; “I know where you are, laying in the sigh of stars”; “I always want you inside of me, in my head, behind my eyes.” Visiting the house he shared with the departed one, looking at the pot in which she once cooked, he declares, “…you never cared for perfection, maybe that’s what made you perfect” (“Homemade”).
Vincent Hollow, the creator of this vibrant work, is a self-described “poetic poltergeist” who has found in his “hauntings and nightmares” a kind of inspiration. His attachment to the process of gradual detachment, expressed in both rhyming and free verse formats, radiates a universal quality. His words are accompanied by evocative line drawings – a cooking pot, a broken mirror, a closet packed to overflowing with skeletons. For cover and interior artwork, Hollow provides haunting grey-tinged photos of empty houses and a shadowy female figure moving through the underbrush.
Hollow’s longings, frustrations, hopes and delusions are realistic, and will be immediately recognizable, and in their own way comforting, to anyone who has lived with and then without someone with whom they felt a deep connection. One musing in particular encompasses the book’s overarching concept with Zen-like simplicity: “Within I am without.” If you like poetry that can deeply touch you as well as inform and enlighten, treat yourself to Welcome Home Little Poltergeist by Vincent Hollow.
