Poems of Life, Love, and the Meaning of Meaning by Wren

Review 4 star

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​Poems of Life, Love, and the Meaning of Meaning by Wren is a book of poetry about philosophy and ideas. It contains about 400 poems. As the title suggests, it is divided into three sections—the first, “Life,” is about regret for missed opportunities, mistakes that hurt people, and inability to communicate with others. Section 2, “Love,” is about romance and describes intense yearning for a woman who the poet avidly admires. The final section, “The Meaning of Meaning,” is about renewal and discusses self-healing through a transcendent plane of inward growth, advocating that fear and pain are illusions that balance Love, which is God and which resides in the universe and in all people.

Wren’s terse, slightly lilting type of verse guides like a focused laser through widely different topics, anchoring them with subtle verbal acrobatics into a pleasant and cohesive unit. Poems of Life, Love, and the Meaning of Meaning is a volume of self-help advice in a poetic format, a unique concept that really delighted me, and I found it to be refreshingly analytical, with a dry and witty take on life that flashed out like lightning in a number of poems. Some of the best and most memorable pieces include “Dorothy Gale” and “Ego on Trial,” innovative breakdowns of familiar ideas with a personification of the Ego as its own individual outside of oneself, as well as the cleverly sarcastic “Dear God,” in which familiar concepts of living well are turned on a dime when it is learned the narrator is dead. A highly individual book that will be enjoyed by minds that like to roam the galaxy in brief poetic installments.