Review of The Shadow of The Truths Heart

[Becca Olsson]

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Shadow of The Truths Heart" by Eric Christopher Bonner.]

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3 out of 4 stars

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The Shadow of Truth’s Heart by Eric C. Bonner is a book of short poems that, despite their length, each holds great significance and deep messages. There are ten parts to this book and each part has its own general theme. Although the poems all fall under one of the ten parts, each one holds its own topic and message.

Poetry itself is a difficult genre to review. Each poem, despite being written by the same author, follows different rhythm patterns and themes. In each one Bonner is creative in his use of metaphors and references, yet these can also make complete comprehension difficult at times. There were some poems where I admit I didn’t fully understand his meaning and others where I was blown away at the depth of his words. Bonner touches on topics of death, grief, racial injustice, religion, and introspection and draws significantly from his own life experiences, as difficult as I’m sure they were to write about.

There are so many positives to this book of poetry. So many individual lines leapt out at me, such as in the titular poem on line 7: “That these verses are touched by an angel that drowned his sorrows in gin”. In other poems it’s the overall message and structure that really hits deep. I encourage anyone who reads this book to pay special attention to the poem “Still Here”. I wanted to include a quote, but I can’t choose one section of it over another without changing the overall effect.

So many poems are like this. Even not understanding all of the references, I could empathize with the author’s grief and frustration at the continued injustice he sees all around him. He truly pulls no punches in being willing to point out the inequalities and painful history specifically of the African American experience.

There were only a few negatives I found and most of them were not with the author’s overall writing. I found several typos, although I admit that it can be difficult to judge the grammar in poetry so I only paid attention to obvious spelling errors. There were also a few instances when the rhythm didn’t flow quite the same way which hampered some of the effect of the poetry. Aside from this, the only problem was the difficulty of keeping track because there are no page numbers and the Table of Contents says all the parts are on page 1.

Overall, I rate this book three out of four stars. As stated above, there were at least ten grammatical errors. Aside from this, I believe the author’s work was exceptional and I was amazed at how he expressed his own experiences and thoughts.

Due to strong themes and a few instances of strong language, I would recommend this book to mature audiences who are looking for a personal perspective of grief and injustices that have been committed and are still being committed within our culture.

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The Shadow of The Truths Heart
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[Mary Lou Mills]

I congratulate you on your courage to take on a poetry book to review. For myself, I find poetry to be quite difficult to grasp. I'm always guessing that it means more or other than expressed.

[Becca Olsson]

I congratulate you on your courage to take on a poetry book to review. For myself, I find poetry to be quite difficult to grasp. I'm always guessing that it means more or other than expressed.

I feel the exact same way sometimes. But I think at times it’s meant to be that way. It makes it difficult to review, but really gets you thinking on all possible meanings.