Book Review: A Solitary Woman by Pamela A. Babusci

A Solitary WomanBook Name: A Solitary Woman 

Author: Pamela A. Babusci 

Genre: Poetry, Tanka 

Paperback: 92 pages 

Published in 2013 

To purchase a signed copy from Pamela, email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Book also available at Createspace and Amazon 

 

Rating: 5 stars 

Short Review: A courageous endeavor to capture the heart of a woman, express its frailty and sensuality and present her for her many strengths.


 

 a solitary woman

knows a heartache

or two

tossing scarlet petals 

into her evening bath

 

It is with appreciation and awe that I approach this review of A Solitary Woman' by Pamela A. Babusci’: a book that held me spellbound right from the start.

What draws me into this mysterious title is her candor, her honest and open expressions in pure poetry. With grace, she led me on these little dances. Pay careful attention to her subtle tunes, sensual feminism and hidden surprises, that reveal the passionate person inside of her.

In A Solitary Woman, Pamela makes use of age-old tanka tools and elements to fine-tune her writing and present tanka at her best.  I have often wondered if a woman can express as much as she contains; the amount of love and bruises alike, joys as well as heartbreaks, silent whispers or unspoken prayers for loved ones. A woman’s heart is an ocean of secrets and I doubt that we ever will open up fully.  However, Pamela dares to bare her heart open; to speak out what I would otherwise be silent about.  You can feel your heart gyrate to the cadence of her experiences and to the highs and lows of her life form as the stars join in smiling with a twinkle in their eyes.

 

Milky Way swirling

in martini glasses

with each sip

we swallow

star after star

 

Love is ageless. Just as you can feel the warmth of a lover’s arms, or the pangs of loneliness in rejection at any time, so does love move the heart of the poet, sprouting with it a tenderness that overwhelms her to the point of tanka out-pour.  She captures this moment in her beautifully worded verse …

 

as if seeing love

for the first time

you bring me

white peonies

wet with morning dew

 

Throughout her book, you will find tanka that touch upon the frailty of life, the truth about illnesses, the heartaches that many women can relate to, and most of all the fragility and strength that a woman possesses.  What I liked most was the way she brought her book to a close. Her concluding tanka signifies hope...  an answer to the call for her soul mate, and connects much deeper than what is obvious.  A woman always lives in hope of appreciation, of love, and of acceptance regardless of the journey she travels through, because she has so much love inside of her to share. Trust Pamela to share this with us, for she has been there, lived through and knows what we feel.

 

her porcelain skin

newly washed like

a fresh water pearl

she awaits her lover’s footprints

across the dewy path 


Back Cover Blurbs:

There are many reasons to fall in love with A Solitary Woman. I did! Lovely, sensuous, brave, spirited tanka in the tradition of Izumi Shikubu, Yosano Akiko, Akitsu Ei and countless others who took the joys and pains of love, life and loss and transformed them into poetry. Hats off to Ms.Babusci for digging deep and unearthing the light in even the darkest moments of the heart. The ancient tradition of tanka lives on around the world, and Ms. Babusci is testament to its enduring power and grace.

--Leza Lowitz, Editor of A Long Rainy Season: Contemporary Haiku and Tanka by Japanese Women and Author, Green Tea to Go: Stories from Tokyo

 

Pamela A. Babusci is an artist. When she writes tanka she "puts a brush into paint & paint onto canvas" and not one shade of emotion or experience is absent from her palette. Hanging comfortably alongside van Gogh's Starry Night, Picasso's Blue Nude and O'Keeffe's Red Canna are honest self- portraits, passionate abstracts, landscapes of a life and soul laid bare. These are tanka of love, grief, pain, strength, longing, and at the heart of each, the pulse of every woman is palpable. In the hands of this gifted poet, A Solitary Woman is an invitation to a private viewing of a remarkable collection.

-- Claire Everett, Editor of Skylark and author of twelve moons.