A Little Something

Book Review

By Richard E. Noble

My first love in writing has always been poetry. I began writing poems as a teenager. This volume contains samples of my poems from the age of 18 to the age of 67.

Several of the poems also have prose introductions. I have loved that type presentation technique from the first time I saw it in a volume by one of my favorite poets, Robert Service.

My poems are the reflection of the different poets who I have read and loved over the years – Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Elliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Ogden Nash, John Milton, Robert Blake, Edgar Allen Poe and others.

I love poetry because of its simplicity. So many things can be said in a poem, and in a very short space, that are rarely spoken of elsewhere – at least not so eloquently.

This volume contains a balanced variety of many different types and styles of poetry that I have “played” with since I was a teenager. "Sunday on the Corner" and "The Call of the Dead" are a couple of my earliest poems. "Edith" and "Have You Come to Take Me Home" are examples of some of my later poems.

I have ballads, poems that rhyme and poems that don’t rhyme. I feel that I have poems in this volume that are so simple, "My Little Friend" and "But Do You Love Me" that even a five year old could find joy in them.

On the other hand there are poems like "A Child of Night," "Scarlet Letter," "Over and Over" and "Making Love" that might cause the intellectual to make note or the seasoned poetry lover to take pause. This is a great book of poetry with no age barrier. I am extremely proud of it.