Category: On My Nightstand

Books Worth Reading

The Cocktail Napkin Love Poems: To Help You Through The Night

In college I used to write poems on cocktail napkins while frequenting happy hours with my boyfriend or other students…why not? Happy Hour at Huck’s had twenty-five cent glasses of wine and I was 18 and full of myself, and wildly in love with language and a man who swept me to another world.

In these pandemic days and nights, like so many other people, I find myself alone, wondering what to do next to fill the long days and nights while we wait for this disaster to pass. For me, being alone has always given rise to creative thoughts and energy. This go-round it reminded me of those old cocktail napkin poems. And so I began to write them again, this time using the “Notes” function on my iPhone: that tiny screen surely approximates the size and weight of a cocktail napkin.

This collection, The Cocktail Napkin Love Poems: Short Verses for Long Nights, includes about thirty love poems, inspired by memory, family, relationships, marriage, and the world I observe every day. The poems are simple and easy to read. They would not a degree in English to parse…just a loving heart. Some of them would make great text for a wedding invitation, or a love letter when your own words just can’t get you there. The cover illustration is by my friend, Anita Ewing, a fellow member of the Muddy Creek Artists Guild, and was inspired by the poem, “We are Diving”:

Near the coral where the fish

are a rainbow of color

only more subtle for they catch

light and move more quickly

than we can tell each other to look.

When I say, “I love you,”

words are like that–

Magnificent and fast.

Watch me instead.

Just now I am a dolphin

bounding for the air

“We are diving” in The Cocktail Napkin Love Poems

The book is available via Amazon, in paperback and in Kindle and, just now, is free on Kindle for those who are members of Amazon Prime.

For those of you embarking on new romances or engagements or in need of Valentine’s Love or anniversary specials, here is my own favorite (from my own book).

What were my dreams

Before I dreamt you?

What were my words

Before I spoke you?

Was there a song

Before I heard you?

I see the world before me.

I see everything

I see you.

From “What Were My Dreams” in The Cocktail Napkin Love Poems

Of course I hope you’ll buy my book or read it in Kindle. Even more, if you’ve read this for, I’d love to hear your comments on these poems. I did not submit to the usual literary journals because these aren’t literary poems. These are cocktail napkin love poems. Love endures. In hard times it is all we have. So perhaps for this little while my poems will help some of you out by going through.

Olive Again

by Elizabeth Strout

Having loved Olive Kitteridge I could not miss this book, Olive Again, although it meant missing book group. Strout has mastered telling a series of stories linked by a character who is not a lead in every tale–not a collection of short stories, not quite a novel, but something rich and absorbing that I cannot resist. I’m so glad Kindle analytics suggested this book to me, or I might have missed it.

In these long weeks of isolation, a story of an isolated old woman gave voice to emotions that many of us might share, no matter our age, gender, circumstance. Although I am a few decades younger than Olive, I certainly appreciate her sense of growing old and more invisible. I’d heard older women speak of this phenomena, but until you live through it, you don’t really understand how dehumanizing it can be.

You thought? You become an afterthought. I so wanted to know how Olive resolved relationships, her own reputation with people in the town, her sense of self and place. Her interactions with different characters–a new husband, a home health aide, a poet, an old friend–each lead Olive to some sense of self, but no sense of her life.

Unfortunately I borrowed this book from the library on Kindle and my notes–the passages I so loved!–vanished when it was reabsorbed. They had to do with isolation, light, and love. I may try to find them, or hope that someone reads this short review and remembers them, or underlined them and points me to them.

I’m not sure I’d want to have a chat with Olive, but reading this book leaves one in a conversation that lingers.