Nocturnal

Title: Nocturnal
Author: Wilder Poetry
First Published: May 7, 2019
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Pages: 86
Genre: Poetry
Format: eARC
Source: NetGalley
Rating:


Synopsis:

The poems of Nocturnal—newly revised and expanded—are constellations to guide those on a journey of healing and self-discovery, no matter how dark the night.

From @wilderpoetry comes a heavily expanded revised edition of Nocturnal, a collection of poetry and beautifully illustrated black-and-white imagery inspired by darkened days and sleepless nights. Poetry meets presentation in each of the four sections ("Dusk," "Northern Lights," "Howl," "Lucid Dreams,"), which trace the author's continuing journey of self-discovery while illuminating a path for others along the way. Ink stains, landscapes, dreamlike animals, blackened pages, and textured spreads create a multifaceted reading experience. And true to the moniker, these poems are linked by a motif of "the wild." Celebrating the art of self-love poetry with both word and image, Nocturnal will leave readers comforted, curious, and inspired to explore the world around them.

Review

Nocturnal is a poetry book about self discovery, love, and healing. This book shared a lot of similarities in style and themes with other popular instapoets such as Rupi Kaur, Alison Malee, and Amanda Lovelace. Like the aforementioned poets, it’s all free-verse with random spacing between lines. While I can appreciate the form at times when the spacing is used to emphasize specific words, most of the time it just feels pointless and serves no real purpose at all.

Now aesthetically speaking, Nocturnal is one of the most beautiful poetry collections I’ve read in some time with full-page art gracing many of the pages. The book’s design is gorgeous and there was a large variety of different illustrations from page to page, I greatly appreciated the attention to detail. A turn of the page would have a feast for the eyes with many of the illustrations being nature-themed and I cannot understate how pretty this book was, excellent job to the publishers and the book designers for the marvelous work that they did on this book.

Unfortunately, looks were pretty much all this collection had going for it. While the book was lovely to look at, the content was forgettable. I didn’t find all that many lines that really stood out to me, there was no rhythm to them. Often I found that as I turned the page I had already forgotten the poem I had just read. The themes were repetitive and they are the same ones you see in every poetry book being published lately but it never manages to do anything new or memorable.

I thought that I would like this collection a lot more than I did, and I honestly wanted to love it with how beautifully the book was designed. If you’re a fan of simple, positive poetry or the poets that I had mentioned earlier then you might appreciate this collection. Like many others, Wilder Poetry has an Instagram account dedicated to poetry that is very pretty to look at. For myself personally, I feel like the market is getting oversaturated and it’s getting to be a little boring. It’s not to say that this collection was bad, there was just nothing that stood out about it to make it great.

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