Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Carol at http://carolwscorner.blogspot.com. Thank you, Carol, for hosting!
My posts have been a little shorter with the summer. Have been out and about as much as I can and seeing friends and enjoying my post-vaccination freedom here in Upstate NY. I hope restrictions are loosening up elsewhere.
The novel in verse, EVERYWHERE BLUE, BY JOANNE ROSSMASSLER FRITZ, published this year by Holiday House deserves another shout out. On 4/22/21, Jone Macculoch posted an excellent interview with the author here if you want to know more about this talented poet.
What I loved most about this book was the musical terms and feeling that coursed through the novel from first page to last. For instance, the book is divided into four parts and each part is named by a musical term: Diminuendo, Adagio, Staccato, and the last is Crecendo. Like a piece of music, the plot and tension builds through poetry.
The novel begins with this poem:
(this is just the first part)
NOVEMBER
November pulls me down.
Like a diminuendo in music,
gradually dying away.
Darkness falls too early
and the chill creeps in.
Before dusk,
before we learn the truth
about my brother,
this day plays out
like any ordinary day,
a symphony of sameness.
Just the way I like it.
The twelve year-old oboe playing main character, Madrigal, faces a problem: her brother, named Strum, has disappeared from college. This is discovered early on and the rest of the book kept me on edge. It’s a mystery, and the author tells the story in poems, mostly free verse, but peppered with carefully crafted and well placed forms such as villanelle, couplets and haiku. As the mystery of the missing brother plays out, we get to know Madrigal’s parents and sibs as they attempt, each in their own way, to deal with this mysterious loss.
Chekov said that happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. By the end of the novel, we understand what it is in this particular family that has caused it to be troubled.
I won’t, of course, reveal how this plot resolves, but the ending gives us hope, and this is a family we like, grow to understand, and in which we see ourselves. I love that in the end, we see Madrigal, who has struggled with playing her oboe, finds more feeling in her music as her family heals.