Review: Dreaming Inside of Streetlights by Anthony Pritchard
Anthony Pritchard’s Dreaming Inside Of Streetlights is an urban landscape of poems that, with themes of loneliness, beauty, suffering and loyalty, petitions the reader to “spend an entire afternoon looking at the sky”. (“Rose Noir”)
Pritchard embraces every emotion that life softly (or perhaps not so) hands to everyone. Pritchard is an observer of people, places, meditating the reason and cause behind every gesture, every feeling, He is a complex poet, whose writing asks for more than feeling, but perhaps, movement as well. He asks the question we all ask: why? Because, he says, it will be the same tomorrow. But, he is full of hope as well, saying that although he is “lifeless,” and “can no longer share [his] dreams", but "still [he] dream[s].”
Anthony promises in his verses thick with loyalty and suffering, "I will untie the universe from your ankle / And you will take off with me." His suffering lies in the lamentations of a tedious nonfulfillment of one’s hopes:
When the world seemed so small, like a snow globe,
We were so enraptured by every gesture of every minute detail
And now that we are awake, truly alone;
This wasteland promises only
That dreams are imposed on the world.
And those who do not dream do not live;
And so we must slip away in the twilight hours.
The moon will not tell.
His feeling is universal, parallels the hopelessness that infests humanity when the lights are low and the day has shrunk into our beds. But, he implies that there are those, like the moon, full of beauty that we can put our dreams and faith into.
His imagery has a redness to it, with never an incomplete thought. He is a Romantic in the sense that he has stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, making his object, such as a broken bowl highly symbolic and idealistic:
Bits of broken bowls line the pavement
As if the moon had fallen;
One woman is picking up the pieces,
Without the strength to weep
Staring into nothing as she sweeps;
A meal untouched going cold on her kitchen table.
All their faces, paused in one expression like the moon before it fell
Or the clock before it stopped.
(“Inquietude”)
Dreaming Inside Of Streetlights is a book to get comfortable with, to explore, examine, and implore your own soul. He never rushes his words, but examines each line with much care.
Anthony Pritchard has four books, Embrace, Ephemerealms, Don't Become A Poet Like I Did, published by Domovoi Publications, an up and coming publisher whose website and shops will be open soon. Dreaming Inside Of Streetlights is available here at Lulu. Ephemerealms is available in all bookstores via store order and most online retailers.
