A Country’s Just a Place

Hooray! Whoop-dee-doo! Fireworks going off inside my head! My newest book of poetry, entitled “A Country’s Just a Place” as you can see in the banner which replaces “Every Day’s a Butterfly” as my latest new book, is now available to the general public, i.e. published. If you go to www.gurukalehuru.com/poetry you will find it, and you’re in plenty of time to buy a copy or two for Valentine’s Day, or somebody’s birthday, or any other occasion where you think poetry might make an appropriate gift.
Or you can just go there and have a look, read a bit of it before buying. It’s not everybody’s Cup of Tea (that was the last new book before Every Day’s a Butterfly, and there are about 14 or 15 before that one.)
It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, as evidenced by one critic over at Rattle’s Anything Goes poetry group, who called my work ‘forced-rhyming tra-la-la poetry,’ which is kind of spot on, in a way.
Of course ‘forced rhyming’ sounds terrible but, when you think about it, all rhymes, like all words put down on paper, are forced. Words don’t just jump onto a page of their own volition and start running around and swinging on the monkey bars. The idea is to make it sound natural, to feel like it’s an even flow, and I think I’m pretty good at that. You be the judge. Go. Read. Then there’s the tra-la-la thing, which she apparently meant as a criticism but, since I want my poems to have a light, musical cadence, and there are lots of great songs which have tra-la-la in there somewhere, I’m pleased with the description.
If you’re looking for something more in line with most modern poetry, which doesn’t use rhyme, is pretty darned casual with maintaining meter, and leaves you scratching your head and wondering what it’s about and feeling illiterate because you don’t quite understand the symbolism, then I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere. That’s not me. That’s not the kind of thing I write.