Title: “Is Poetry Life” Yes!
Author: Randy W. McDonald
Publisher: PageTurner Press and Media, LLC
ISBN: 978-1-63871-569-6
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 170
Reviewed by: Allison Walker
Pacific Book Review
“Is Poetry Life” Yes! is a memoir made in poems. Poet Randy W. McDonald captures each poem like a small, perfect snapshot into a poet’s life. To read the collection is like looking at a photo album of a person you don’t know but whose life seems very familiar. Some of the poems are about darker, sadder topics but overall, the collection could keep a G rating. The poems aren’t meant to be shocking. In fact, many of the poems are actually love letters to the poet’s wife. If life is about finding love, then poetry must have something to do with it, McDonald seems to express in his collection.
The poems have a grandfatherly tone of voice, or maybe it is just that many of the poems impart the wisdom of a life well lived. Throughout “Is Poetry Life” Yes! McDonald maintains this consistent and revisits certain, recurring themes within the poems; such as the rose and the lady. McDonald’s own sense of repetition adds to the feeling you are peering into a life via poetry. There is a kind of logic applied to the rhythm and line breaks of the poems. In this way, by the novelty of their structure, the poems seem born uniquely of their creator.
As a whole, “Is Poetry Life” Yes! could be improved were the poems to flow in some more natural way; that the poems were collected to tell a story about this poet’s life and their scheduled appearances the narration thereof. Also, some of the poems break structure as they struggle toward their conclusion. An example of this is the poem ‘Irish Love,’ which has a very strict rhyming and meter structure. The poem reads like a dance itself, each step of the dance in perfect beat and you can almost hear Molly Malone playing in the background as you read. However, the last five lines suddenly deviate from the rhyming and syllable pattern and the two dance partners, and your tongue, seem to tumble into each other.
To address the question, is poetry life, perhaps the answer is that poetry is sometimes the only way to capture the magnificent experience that is life. McDonald’s poems surely do this. For a reader longing for poetry to tell the story of an ordinary life in a beautiful way, “Is Poetry Life” Yes! is a series of letters, correspondences, written to the reader. It will surely suffice.
