Selected Poems 1967- 2007: Hudson Owen

The 63 poems in this volume represent four decades of the author’s writing life. The reader will find poems of work, love, loss, sports, art, the natural world, in a variety of verse forms. There are tears, laughter, reflections, dreams in these pages. The author believes that the verities of Truth and Beauty are as relevant for poets today as they were when John Keats announced them in his day.

Comments from readers on poems included in this book:

“I like ‘Evening Near The Park’ and the Samuel Morse poem very much.”
Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer Prize winner

In response to a poem written about a painting by the artist:
“You have done in words what I attempted in paint. Thank you for it.”
James Wyeth

“Your ‘Mona Lisa’ was excellent!”
T.E. Breitenbach, Painter and Author of Proverbidioms

Front cover by the author.

Hudson Owen was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1946 and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. He is a published poet, essayist and produced playwright in New York City, where he has acted. He is also a photographer and digital artist.

Dear Hudson

I promised to review your book:
you sent it in the post.
It did not come for weeks and weeks
and we thought it had got lost.

So when at last it landed here
there was some celebration
because I was, I will admit
pleased to have your publication.

I read your intro with delight:
you’re articulate and funny
(I especially enjoyed the parts
where you talked about the money).

But when I came to read your verse
I got a little worried:
your rhyming schemes are fine but
your meter’s rather hurried.

Your early poems are sweet and warm
but not sophisticated;
the one you call The Kissing Song
I very nearly hated.

Despite my reservations, though,
I vowed I would read on
but when I was less than half-way through
my interest had gone.

I prefer my poetry
To have a deeper meaning:
I like it strong and brave and bold
With a literary leaning.

I really like the Thomas boys,
Ted Hughes and Daniel Abse:
I consider the work of Ezra P
to be absolutely fabsy.

You are so close to rather good
I find it tantalising:
your poems could be so improved
with just a little more revising.

If you could try to up your game
and sharpen every line,
and layer images with meaning
then I think you’ll do just fine.

So please, dear Hudson: do not weep.
Do not be cross with me.
I think you have a talent
and I reached page forty-three.

Lines of Neutrality: SB Jung

FICTION/THRILLERS

Lines of Neutrality is a window into the lives of two modern-day assassins—Raven Yin and Christian Delacroix. Unbeknownst to either of them, they are both hired to kill the same mark and coincidentally choose the exact same night and time to strike. This begins a chain of events that brings Raven and Christian together to fight a war far larger and more complex than either of them could have imagined. It is a war being waged against secret societies whose agendas are more enigmatic than their rumoured existence.

Their personalities and methods are fundamentally different, yet each of them discovers more about themselves by studying the other. Despite secret societies, internal betrayal, stolen memories and personal battles, Raven and Christian defy the odds to show that the Society of Assassins is nobody’s pawn.

S. B. Jung has been an English teacher since 2002. She has been writing plays, poems, and novels since 1997; Lines of Neutrality is her first published work. Her husband Matthew and son Aiden have been her strength, encouragement, and inspiration as she continues to write and create more worlds for readers to enter and enjoy.

SB Jung is a writer with real promise and Lines of Neutrality: Book One of the Assassin Chronicles has an interesting premise. Her text is lovely and clean, her grammar is pretty much spot-on, and I found that the pages of this book turned with a very pleasing swiftness: but despite all that, only read as far as page seventeen.

The problems I found were, for the most part, small and easy to correct: for example, the appendix is the first thing I found after the dedication page but the information it provides is confusing when presented here—it would have been much better placed at the back of the book; the cover design is unprofessional, and not terribly attractive; and the text on that front cover is blurry, slightly out of focus, and is in a font which really isn’t clear enough. The copy on the back cover needs attention too: it’s a little confused, a little cliched, and in places doesn’t quite make sense.

Moving on to the main text, then, I found a few quibbles which a decent edit would almost certainly resolve: there were some contradictions and lapses of logic which caused me to pause and rethink, and so spoilt the flow as I read. But the biggest problem that I had was that while this text is far more fluent and absorbing than most of the books I’ve reviewed here, it is still quite clearly the work of a novice writer—a talented and potentially very capable one, but still a novice.

I’d like to see what Ms Jung’s writing becomes when she’s written, and read, a great deal more. I have the feeling she could turn out to be competent and productive, and that in the years to come she might well produce books which are far superior to this good-but-flawed beginner’s effort.

As They Grow Older: S M Cashmore

Witch Street is paved with stories for children. Strange stories. Spooky stories. Halloween stories.

This collection, AS THEY GROW OLDER, has a life of its own. Starting with The Toyman and The Grumpy Browns to fascinate the very young, the stories themselves grow older, stranger and spookier, until the almost adult Last and Longest Story at the very end.

AS THEY GROW OLDER should be read with the lights dimmed, read aloud at Halloween. It doesn’t matter how old your children are, there is a spooky story in this collection written especially for them to listen to…..

If they dare.

This collection of short, spooky stories is cleaner than most, with a mercifully-low error-count. The writer has a fluent, if rather naive style; and he has a good grasp of grammar, too. These things count strongly in his favour and were I reading this as a slush-pile submission rather than a published book, those good points would mean that he was automatically in the top ten per cent of the work before me.

He would still receive a rejection, though. His tone is at times a little patronising and while that might have worked a few decades ago it’s no longer acceptable in children’s fiction; and his stories, while perfectly pleasant, are neither convincing nor compelling. The story Nearly Nine describes a monster which lives in the narrow space behind the wardrobe: consequently, it’s shaped like a bath mat (and I quite liked that idea). The bath mat monster ripples across the bedroom floor one night, creeps up onto the bed where a child lies sleeping and—here’s the punchline—wishes him a happy birthday. And that’s the end of the story. This could have been done so much better: had the monster approached the child a few times but been thwarted, and had the reader had known that the monster felt the time was running out, the reader would have wondered why it wanted to reach the boy and there would have been some real tension to the story. As it is, we have some funny description of the monster, a brief moment of tension—and then it’s over, and nothing much has happened.

I’d advise this writer to work more on the structure of his stories, to consider developing their narrative arcs a little more fully, and to update his tone just a little. I read a respectable forty-nine pages out of a total of 369, and feel that this writer has plenty of unrealised potential.