Official Review: In His Hour by Naim Steward

[RussetDivinity]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "In His Hour" by Naim Steward.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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This brief collection of poems covers a wide variety of topics, from love to lust to religion, making for, at times, a rather jumbled selection. There doesn’t seem to be any order to how the poems are arranged in the book, leading to a poem about sex appearing right between a poem about the speaker’s struggles growing up and a poem about the love of a mother for her children. While surprises in poetry are often welcome, this collection didn’t feel so much surprising as hastily-constructed, and so I can only give it 2 out of 4 stars.

What I liked most about these poems was the strong voice that each one had. The best way I found to read them was not to simply experience them as words on a page but to do my best to imagine a voice reading them aloud to me, as though they were being performed. Doing that allowed me to feel the power that existed in the poems and experience them as something beyond just words on a page, since reaching past the page is something that I believe all poetry aspires to do.

However, there wasn’t much else in the poems that reached past the page. Each poem is straightforward about what it means to say, to the point of at times lacking any kind of subtlety. When a poem is about religion, it is explicitly about religion; when a poem is about love, it is explicitly about love; when a poem is about sex, it is explicitly about sex (in more ways than one). While there’s nothing wrong with straightforward poetry, I found nothing in these poems that I could really delve into beyond what was written on the page.

The other complaint I had seems rather petty when written down in a review, but when reading the book, it proved to be a large distraction: the formatting was poorly laid out. The lines didn’t always break properly, the table of contents was difficult to understand, and one poem, for some reason, was entirely in capital letters. These feel like rather small complaints, but when taken together, they add up to make a book that’s rather annoying to read.

In short, there’s not much to recommend this collection. People who like strong-voiced poetry might like it, as might those who aren’t interested in picking apart poems to find hidden depths, but for everyone else, I’d suggest finding a different collection to read.

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In His Hour
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