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lefttoread 's review for:
Turn Up the Ocean: Poems
by Tony Hoagland
I've struggled with poetry in the past and thought I had given up on it. Due to some recent changes in my life, I decided to give it another try. I even researched tips on how to read and enjoy poetry. I found an article that helped me along my way, the article mentioned a couple of poems the writer loved and why, so I tried those first, keeping in mind what the writer of the article had said about each one. The article also suggested that poems often need to be read more than once to fully understand them or at least take something away from them.
After reading the poems from the article and finding that I had a different experience with poetry this time around, I was open to finding more, and I wanted a collection I could dive into. That's when Turn Up the Ocean appeared in a Youtube video I was watching and I felt drawn to pick it up. I immediately sought it out and to my surprise, I ended up devouring this collection.
Turn Up the Ocean is beautiful, deep, sad and eye-opening. I would like to read more by Tony Hoagland as this collection resonated with me. As the article mentioned, there were a few poems that I noted down to go back to at a future date as I didn't quite understand them. But I found this was okay this time around, especially after reading the afterword by Kathleen Lee. She shared how the pieces she decided to put in the collection might never have been considered polished enough for a book by Tony himself, but how she enjoyed the roughness of them. I found this sentiment echoed in several of the poems, particularly 'Incompletion,' which reflects our ongoing search for something more or 'complete' and I think this is exactly how the collection was meant to be.
After reading the poems from the article and finding that I had a different experience with poetry this time around, I was open to finding more, and I wanted a collection I could dive into. That's when Turn Up the Ocean appeared in a Youtube video I was watching and I felt drawn to pick it up. I immediately sought it out and to my surprise, I ended up devouring this collection.
Turn Up the Ocean is beautiful, deep, sad and eye-opening. I would like to read more by Tony Hoagland as this collection resonated with me. As the article mentioned, there were a few poems that I noted down to go back to at a future date as I didn't quite understand them. But I found this was okay this time around, especially after reading the afterword by Kathleen Lee. She shared how the pieces she decided to put in the collection might never have been considered polished enough for a book by Tony himself, but how she enjoyed the roughness of them. I found this sentiment echoed in several of the poems, particularly 'Incompletion,' which reflects our ongoing search for something more or 'complete' and I think this is exactly how the collection was meant to be.