Soft Dawn (Record of Life Poetry Collection Book 17)

Disappointment is a fact of life that can plague one in the form of internal winter, an emotional frost that gains clarity through the quiet passing of the seasons. Autumn transitions into winter, and finally, the sun will rise with spring. A volume focused on the beauty of clarity that crosses the gaze like transparent glass, the seventeenth volume of the Record of Life series, Soft Dawn is a poetic touchstone that honors a range of merging themes, experiences, and perspectives for the speaker. Presented in the order in which they were written, the collection’s poems reflect a stream of consciousness that traverses a semester in a transitional state, from isolation to revelation, from chronic withdrawal to social equilibrium.A conversation with the self and an observation of the world outside, the literary work is broken into four continuous parts that function as chapters in a poetic story. Divided into: The Tundra, Freeze, Hearth and Forge, and Home, the collection ponders femininity, peer surveillance, the compression and pressure of visibility, the suspension of time, unspoken questions, uncertainty in a stretch of emotional distance, and the hold of peace amidst boredom. The first part, The Tundra, explores loss, which merges with confusion, and the flattening of emotions under the watch of quiet evaluation. Freeze, moves into the pedestalization of a straitjacketed role, pinned expectations, and projections that enwrap the individual to function in their perception of a pressurized cage, yet not suffocate within the bubble. The third part, Hearth and Forge, observes the speaker’s adaptation to a liminal space where the past becomes shadows and tentative trust builds as the individual recenters beneath the weight of required transformation. An internal fragility is cloaked in the collection’s final part, Home, where closed chapters give way to a calm center. A permanent inner change of seasons passes to the arrival of spring with the end of winter; the immortalization of new hope and trust despite the desire for a dangled future that never seems to come. Read more