The Opaque Garden by Anna C Jones: book review

The Opaque Garden - A Poetry Collection by Anna C Jones (2013) is a collection of 20 poems under six sections: Trails, Gardens, Flowers, Wilting Blossoms,The Path Out of Eden, and Epitaphs.

From Cheshire, England, in a town on the banks of River Mersey, Anna Jones gains her inspiration for writing from nature. She refers to her collection of poems as a ‘museum of thoughts’ – unwanted recollections, discarded dreams, and ‘demons that dwell in the dark patios of even the most sun drenched gardens.’

The poems are not as demonic and dark as the author portrays, exploring more about the cycle of nature representing the cycle of relationships, moods, careers, and life’s experiences in general.

This viewpoint is better explained through the following verses in the poem Burning Time (A Story of Nature) in the Gardens section: ‘Swallowed by the blanket / of a vast and barren landscape / the gate stands / a bookmark to the possibility / of the eternal vision’ and ‘There are morals and privileges / bound to the stories of love and loss / and like nature, so unforgiving / and unpredictable …’

The collection is full of vivid imagery and flowing thoughts that dig up the past, as if finding treasures in a museums’ archives.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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