Title: Prime Poems
Author: Alison Fromager
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
ISBN: 978-1-5462-9204-3
Pages: 64
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by: Marie Whiteson
Pacific Book Review
Frankly this book, Prime Poems by Alison Fromager caught me by surprise. Surely I wasn’t expecting a “Roses are Red” type of book, yet in her unabashed reveal of emotions, page after page, my heart felt exactly the feelings she put into her collection of poetry. Her losses, physical pain brought on by a ruthless disease, and personal loneliness, brought to me an empathic tear to my eye upon finishing this remarkable and unique book. Yes, I was deeply touched by her poems, which is exactly what a book within this genre should achieve.
Certainly Prime Poems is not a morbid book, as there are many feelings of love and maternal nurturing. However with the apparent loss of a person she felt destined to have a future, she began to see how one event could change her life forever. The theme of teenage violence also was woven through some of her prose, offering a glimpse of a bizarre world in which we live. Within one poem she even questions the values of whether the world-wide-web is a good thing, as along with the depth of information creates spots for bullies and mentally deviated persons to hide behind a factious email or IP address. Enabling mentally ill deviants a focal spot to gather on the web has the real danger of allowing them to gain critical mass and organize death and destruction.
The other shock was her candid outcry of loneliness and pain brought on by a rare debilitating disease called ‘Behcets.’ Writing her thoughts so unambiguously must clearly have been an outlet, in a way, for her suffering. Readers seeing such beauty in her soul and having to deal with so many issues cannot be untouched by Fromager’s poems on this topic.
Each poem is short with the use of vocabulary familiar to everyone. It is the way she structures her feelings and emotions, quite honestly and unpretentiously, which makes her poetry so impactful. The book is laid out in a progression, I believe, which follows Fromager’s early work and ends with her most current. It takes more time to reflect on all the content of a poem than the time to read the poem, making this book an ideal companion for a trip where a reader will likely pause, look around while contemplating what was just read, and by doing so become removed from the mundane of the present and dwell in the mindset of Alison Fromager. As she states in her introduction, one of her regrets is that her parents did not live long enough to see her publication of Prime Poems. It would be regretful in any lover of poetry did not get to read this book, as it is something which will stay with readers for a long time. Prime Poems is a captivating, deep thought collection that induces reflection in the reader. This collection is not to be read in one sitting from start to end, but should be read randomly when our heart wants to speak to our mind.
