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- Timeless Incantation
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- Author: Jay Blue
- Reviewer: Judith Woolcock Colombo
- Publisher: Publish America, Baltimore (2004)
- ISBN: 1413728588
- Rating: * * Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1413728588/scriquil
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- "How do I Love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breath and height
My soul can reach…"
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- These lines, written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning over a century and a half ago, are famous the world over. Almost everyone who reads or hears them recognizes either the poet or the poem. For the very few who have never heard of this poem, the words are still familiar. They express feelings we have all experienced or will experience: love and passion.
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- In Timeless Incantation by Jay Blue, these feelings of love, passion and friendship are expressed in a series of love poems dedicated to his wife. However, the book opens not with a love poem, but with an ode to a park bench that although inanimate welcomes people, lovers included, to sit and observe nature and the passage of the seasons.
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- The theme of time passing is tied in throughout the collection with other themes: true love, friendship, nature and God's constant presence. The title poem Timeless Incantation, expresses some of these sentiments in lines such as:
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- "For she my muse my dearest friend enables me such passions.
So inspired by her greatest values.
I strive for God's greatest gift.
I embrace her deepest love.
No others shall raise above this timeless incantation."
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- The poems although dedicated to true love, which the poet believes is eternal, also develop the theme of friendship. In poems such as The Fractured Shard of You and Angels on Silent Wings, the poet speaks of being comforted by this lover and friend whose mere presence restores his equilibrium.
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- The theme of time and eternal love is mentioned in several poems, but developed in Eternal Walls I Climb. The poet speaks of searching for his wife and true love through many lifetimes, willing to climb eternal walls and continue the search until he has found her again and again in each lifetime.
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- The book ends as it starts with the park bench that has witnessed the growth of love through spring, summer and fall, and now getting ready for winter.
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- Timeless Incantation's appeal lies not in the poet's skill, but in the emotions he expresses. This is not the work of Barrett-Browning, Shakespeare or William Harris, but of a man whose entire life is devoted to his love of one person, his wife. The book's charm lies in the emotions it expresses and serves to teach us that we all can be poets with the right someone to inspire us.
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