A Book of Poems: The Inner Soul by Anthony F Rando    Books by Anthony F Rando · After The Storm                 >> View all
Category:	Poetry	Publisher:	authorhouse	ISBN-10:	1449099912
Pages:	52	Copyright:	May 6, 2010	ISBN-13:	9781449099916

Passionate poems about love, loneliness, and loss.
In A Book of Poems: The Inner Soul, Anthony Rando writes about love, fear, and loss,
subjects that have moved authors for as long as people have been writing poetry. Here
Rando shares his deepest feelings, exploring them through metaphor and simile. The
voice of the poet is earnest throughout this collection. Readers will feel as though Rando
wrote the poems in the midst of the intensity of feeling that he describes. They are raw
and honest, holding back no emotion; they are love and longing in real time. The author
makes little attempt to temper his passion with balance or perspective.

Rando employs images of light and dark to speak of sadness and loss and to contrast that
sadness with the joy he dreams of possessing once again. The majority of the poems in
the collection are love poems, written for a woman he compares to an angel, of whom he
writes, “She is my heaven, my earth. She is everything to my heart." Some of these
poems are written in the second person, speaking directly to her, and many are
descriptions of this woman and the overwhelming feelings that the author has for her.
Rando showers his beloved with praise and adoration throughout the book. A reader will
no doubt long to find someone so worthy or perhaps dream that a poet will one day write
such a poem for her.

Though most of Rando's poems are celebrations of the love he has found, and the woman
with whom he has found it, the poems speak also of sadness. Rando hints at the
loneliness he felt before finding this love, the emptiness he feels without her. “The Rose
from Afar” is an example of this tension between joy and emptiness.


The Rose from Afar

The sweet smell of her skin
A warm wind embracing my heart
Like a blanket wrapped around my soul
The morning sunshine surrounds the mountains above
A beautiful rose appears from afar
Colors so vibrant they illuminate your darkest days
Tears fill my eyes as I watch the rose disappear into the
night sky
Missing my rose, like love missing from my empty heart.

Rando truly writes from the heart, expressing his joy and his pain with equal intensity.
The title of this collection, The Inner Soul is fitting, as this book is Rando's deepest and
most personal emotions set on paper.

Quill says: Passionate poems about love, loneliness, and loss.

http://www.featheredquill.com/reviews/Poetry/rando.shtml



"A reflection of perseverance and inspiration."
A Book of Poems: The Inner Soul by Anthony F. Rando are reflections of his life over the last ten years. When I read the introduction, that he had been a victim of a hit and run accident and some of these were written while he was recovering, the context of some of the poems was clear. The fact that he has taken the time to contemplate and find joy in life was evident throughout.

The introductory photography images introducing each poem entice the reader to turn to the next page. I found some of these poems to be simplistic. However, there is beauty in that simplicity. They were easy to understand. The suffering, endurance and refinement that the author has experienced was transparent.

"A Drifting Tide" was my favourite poem about a journey of hope. Anyone who has experienced the pain of any injury, mental or physical, and the recuperation process would have empathy for this poetry. Anthony has been compiling these poems for the last ten years and you can see the transitions that have happened and the emotion he is sharing.

I am curious to see what the next five to ten years of his life brings. His goal is to write about the continuing journey of life and I am looking forward to reading more of his poetry.

- TBR topbookreviewers.com