Poet – DaneCobain.com

Title: Birthday Letters

Author: Ted Hughes

Type: Poetry

Page Count: 198

Rating: 3.75/5

I’ve always been more of a Plath fan than a Hughes fan, but that made this interesting because the poems were pretty much all about Plath and his relationship with her, so there was quite a lot there for me to enjoy.

The fact is, I don’t much like Hughes as a person, but as a poet, it’s hard to knock him. In fact, this did a lot to make me change my mind about him, at least a little bit. I’ve read a few other bits and pieces by Ted Hughes here and there, but this did at least made me want to read some more of his stuff.

It’s not exactly my type of poetry, but it is still pretty close and it’s definitely food for thought, and definitely worth reading. If nothing else, it was interesting to see how Hughes’ work has influenced some of the other poets that I like. He has a certain flair and a way with words that makes it a pleasure to read his stuff, at least here. Just maybe not always.

Learn more about Birthday Letters.

Rupi Kaur – The Sun and Her Flowers | Review

Title: The Sun and Her Flowers

Author: Rupi Kaur

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 256

Rating 3.5/5

I honestly wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book anywhere near as much as I did. Kaur gets a bad rep for being an “Instagram poet” and because the content of basically all of her stuff is about relationships and feminism, but I don’t see how either of those are inherently bad things.

True, I didn’t much like the illustrations and I did start to flag with it towards the end, but I think that’s only natural when you’re reading so much poetry on the same theme. On the other hand, I really like it when poets build up a picture with just a few words, and I think Kaur is pretty good at that. In that respect, her work actually reminds me a little bit of a sort of feminist Charles Bukowski, which is almost ironic. I suspect they’d both take umbrage at that comparison.

All in all then, I was pleasantly surprised by this, and while it’s far from my favourite poetry collection, it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be and to be honest, above average when compared to pretty much all of the poetry I’ve ever been sent for review for my book blog. The difference is that I sought this one out, or at the very least I picked it up from a charity shop because I saw it. Yeah.