“Pulse” … Just in Time for National Poetry Month

PULSE: A REVIEW OF NATASHA HEAD’S NEW BOOK

by

Jamie Dedes (The Poet by Day, a journey in poem)

If you have an interest in poetry, Natasha Head is probably on the periphery of your radar even if you don’t know her as well as many do through her blog, The Tashtoo Parlour, her participation in a leadership role on d’Verse ~ Poets Pub, and as the founder and coordinator of New World Creative Union. 

A highly visible part of our community of poets, writers, and bloggers, she’s an accomplished poet and writer, wife and mother, and real estate agent ~

Natasha says she …

has been weaving words since I was but a wee lass running with crayons and scribblers …”

… and she continues with her poems online along with Running With Crayons, her whimsical art

Her debut poetry collection (from Winter Goose Publishing) was Nothing Left to Lose. It was a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2012. A year later – almost to the day – we have her newest offering, Pulse.

Nothing Left to Lose is a collection of self-contained poems that tell the author’s personal story of everyday difficulties, disillusionment, and disappointment to which we can all relate. Ultimately it is about trial and transformation, which is the essential theme of both books.

Trapped between what was, what
is …no movement; fear
holds me motionless.

All directions equal no choice, as
fear gives way to chaos …
enslavement.

What needs to be done, I
don’t want to do, my thoughts
constant, my nightmares

real, feeling force, breaking
pressure, resisting to the point
of stagnation

Static, Natasha Head in Nothing Left to Lose

Pulse (also from Winter Goose Publishing) is a short epic, a narrative stream of poems that together form a modern-day odyssey of a family caught in a web of prostitution and abandonment, alcohol and drugs, delusion and deceit. When the worst happens to the young woman who is central to the story she is wrapped in silence … at first unchosen and then embraced … In this silence appears the potential for her to reinvent herself. She has been tested. Will she answer the call to transformation?

Pulse is a dramatic fiction, but I didn’t find it melodramatic or manipulative, which it could have been in hands less skilled. The poems here are lucid and direct. The language is plain and mostly understated, interesting in its relative coolness juxtaposed against the girl’s grit as it unfolds. The storyline gets heated but never overheated.

The pacing of the poems as we move from one to the next serves the narrative well, starting slowly and moving more quickly as we reach the crisis and the denouement, where it becomes almost relaxed. The characters are unsavory, but not one-dimensional.

There is nothing worse
than waiting in the dark,
no distraction,
alone.
Mother trying her best
and she
ducked low
in the furthest corner
of a forgotten closet
where she was safe to shine the flashlight
on ancient magazines
and little golden books
where she would realize
there was no such thing as fairy tales,
and princes never stayed.”

Sal, Natasha Head in Pulse

Altogether I’d say Pulse is a good read, worth your time. Both my thumbs up for this one…Brava, Natasha!

© 2013, review, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
©2013, portrait, cover art, and poems, Natasha Head and/or Winter Goose Publishing, all rights reserved ~ used here with permission

JAMIE DEDES ~ My worldly tags are poet and writer. For the past five years on medical retirement due to a chronic, potentially life-threatening illness, I’ve blogged at The Poet by Day, formerly titled Musing by Moonlight. The gift of illness is more time for poetry. Through the gift of poetry (mine and that of others), I enter sacred space.