Alone Among Many by Spargo Postle

Alone Among Many
by Spargo Postle
CreateSpace
Copyright © October 2011
ISBN: 978-1466402577
$14.99 Paperback
$7.99 Amazon Kindle
102 Pages

ABOUT:

People of all ages, genders and backgrounds can suddenly feel all alone, isolated and secluded from the world around them. Whether it is because we live our lives on our own or it’s simply because we feel we don’t fit in with our surroundings. Loneliness can feel like a disease to others and nobody will talk about it because they may get ‘inffected’ by us. Alone Among Many is written for those who have felt such remoteness, not as a self-help book but as a way of saying “we, we many, we feel as you do… We are lonely…”

As a contemporary poet Spargo Postle recognises the loneliness and isolation we can all sometimes feel, even when we are seemingly among many others. His poetry expresses what we all feel but are unable to speak of, out loud. This selection of poetry was made by Spargo Postle himself and includes some of his best known works including We Are Lonely, A Man Of Few Words and I’m Scared of the Darkness…

REVIEW:

I fully admit poetry is as hard to review as it is to write.  I myself have struggled with both.

Spargo Postle’s collection of poetry, Alone Among Many, appealed to me because there’s a lot of movement in his poems. Spargo’s style is to keep his verses extremely short.  Reading several of the poems back to back may even give you the sense of falling as your mind races down the page along with your eyes.

They are often short poems with just a few verses, but if read aloud with the right pauses and crescendos, each poem would certainly tell a story. Here’s a good sample from the poem called “We Are Lonely:”

We stand at the edge of your life,
neither in nor out.
Rarely speaking,
just seeing and hearing.

Don’t say you are sad,
we know you don’t care.
Just remember that we,

we many,
we are lonely.

Or this piece from “In a World of Contradiction,” one of the longer pieces in the book, which was one of my favs:

I am contributing to the good of man,
I am not contributing enough.
For the good of man
for my own good.
So that I am better.
That I am saving the world
from death and pestilence,
starvation and deprivation.
That I should have listened,
that I didn’t hear.

The collection is about 80 pages of poems.  There are 35 poems total with the last 5 being a series called Unfinished Love Story.

My only complaint would be that some of the verses are made up of lines of just one or two words, like this verse:

why me
why now
why not him
why not her
why not you
why?

Verses like this quickly become repetitive and also predictable to the reader.  We could even add to them: why us, why them, why we… While effective when read aloud with the right amount of breath and enunciation, they lack true effect on the written page when being read by someone else.

Those who like sing-song rhyming poetry may be disappointed.  No rhymes here. I myself can appreciate both.  As a poet, Postle does have talent at word use and at making his reader contemplate what they have just read, long after the last page.