Perihelion*

I am at a point closest to it, orbiting the narrative, eager to explore the setting, meet the characters, and find myself falling into The Book of Fire. It has a cover the colours of flames: red, orange and yellow. It is adorned with tears, so sad is the story.

The author embraces sadness, loss and recovery, sets fire to a Greek island with it, lets it engulf a village, and it seems as if all the magic, memories and love have gone up in smoke with the trees and wildlife. I feel the heat like breath on my face, it burns my fingers as I turn each page and watch the suffering, death and loss, of homes and loved ones.

I am overwhelmed with the urge to comfort the main character, Irini, when she finds the man who started the fire, barely alive with a rope around his neck, beneath her beloved half-charred chestnut tree, and I feel her pain when she is torn between helping him and leaving him to his fate.

I feel her despair at her daughter Chara’s injuries, her husband Tasso’s burnt hands, and his depression because he cannot paint the scenery he loves – it too has been burnt and all he has left are memories in the remaining landscapes on the walls of his dead father’s house.

But then I marvel at the glimmers of optimism that dot the novel, when Chara starts to draw the blackened forest, or when they rescue a burnt jackal and nurse it back to health, and mourn the characters and their hopeful world when the novel comes to an end.

Kim M. Russell, 7th September 2023

Laura is our host at the dVerse Poets Pub this Thursday, where we are meeting the bar with prose poems.  She tells is that today is National Buy a Book day and has given us some wonderful examples of poems about books by Rebecca Hazelton and Roger Mitchell, both of which are prose written as poetry: it looks like prose but reads like poetry, has paragraphs rather than lines, but includes some familiar poetry devices.

Our challenge is to go to the last book we bought/read (or make it a favourite one if we can’t remember) and write a prose poem about it in approximately 250-300 words.

*the point nearest to the sun in the path of an orbiting celestial body (such as a planet)

29 thoughts on “Perihelion*”

  7. I feel for the scenery artist. Your nice review makes me want to read the book. I’ll check with our library. Thank you for your comment. Let us hope that science will hurry and find a cure. By medicine now, we can delay its progress some. Right now I am taking an eye vitamin every day.
    ..

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  8. Fires in Greek forests is a bit too close to home for me, Kim. I don’t know that I’d be able to suspend disbelief and find comfort or optimism in the situation. The characterisation has obviously marked you deeply though, a testament to the quality of the writing.

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    1. I was a bit worried about that too. It was written before the fires happened this summer, and the writing is so beautiful you overlook that. It’s by the author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo.

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