Storm Coming!

In order to write good poetry, you have to be able to compress words, add imagery, employ similes, metaphors, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. Then you must try to come up with a new theme, or a new twist on an old subject, so that in the end, we are left with something breathless and bittersweet--an insight that stays with us and enriches and influences our life. Audrey Baird has done all this in her first book, Storm Coming! (Boyds Mills Press). There isn't a cliché or hackneyed phrase in the whole book. If you didn't like rainy weather, you will now. You will embrace not only rain, but thunder, lightening, rainbows, puddles, fog, galoshes, wind, drizzle, and clouds.I am amazed at Audrey's freshness. Take lines like "Churning clouds with heavy eyebrows brush the hills at daybreak...." What an original appropriate metaphor."Storm Concert" is spectacular with its comparison to the philharmonic, no reaching for comparisons, no grappling for simile, all of it falls into place so smoothly that it fits like your skin. It is never jarring, never overwritten, never self conscious. One of the best lines in the whole book is in "Rainy Windows." At the very end. The poem reads; "In the car on a rainy day, the blip-blap, blip-blap of windshield wipers makes everything outside blurry and soft-edged, like dreams just after waking."LIKE DREAMS JUST AFTER WAKING! Blurry and soft edged. Captured exactly. A powerful line.In "Thief" we have the storm man slipping through the night with a bag of rain on his shoulder . . . lightning flashes from his fingers!It is difficult to sell a BOOK of poetry. It is close to impossible if you are a new author and don't have a huge track record. So this is a coup, and it is fine to realize someone is out there sniffing out quality in a publishing world that usually looks for more of the same thing. If it sells in pink, do it in blue.My only regret is the book has illustrations. I don't like to be told, especially with poetry, what to imagine. I want the words themselves to create the pictures in my mind. Illustrations of poems are interference in our creativity and imagination. Any illustrations. And I found some of these illustrations pedestrian. When you read, you can move away from annoying noises, fighting neighbors, unpleasant scenery, to the quiet of your own hearth or atelier. But you can't move away from annoying pictures in a book-you have to take them with you. That is unfair.But the heart of the beast is in the poem. And the heart of the poem is Audrey.About the Author: Judy Delton has published over two hundred books with Dell, Harper, Houghton Mifflin, Doubleday, Dutton, Harcourt, Hyperion, Disney and others. Her Pee Wee Scout series has sold over 7.5 million, and has just come out in Turkish, and in Braille. She has two new novels out with Houghton Mifflin, and regularly publishes a plethora of essays, articles, and literary criticism.