Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236592 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Customer Reviews

Wonderfully disturbing
In these hundred poems, Selima Hill portrays her lover not only as a horse, a donkey, a zebra, but also as a bungalow, as a yellow camper van, as a wardrobe. The mood covers just as wide and weird a range too, with the person in the portraits skittering in Hill's mind like a cockroach, between a tyrant, an idol, a comforter and a boring irrelevance.

Jackie Kay has described Selima Hill's poetry as wonderfully disturbing, and never has this been more true than here. The startling images, the short sharp shock of everyday language twisted into extraordinary ideas, the daring assertions that spring out and slash to pieces all the certainties we thought we had about life and love.

This might make Portrait of my Lover as a Horse sound like a difficult book. It isn't. Or only in the sense of coping with what it might do to your life. If I could give one slim volume to someone who doesn't get poetry, this would be it. Most of the poems are only a few short lines long. All of the words are ones we've known since shildhood. It's the way she puts them together that is disturbingly wonderful.

REVIEW OF THIS TERRIBLE BOOK AS HORSE-DUNG
I have never before felt the need to review a book on Amazon. And I have NEVER EVER thrown a book away. However, I happily ditched this in the recycling within hours. This is not a talented poet. This is not a book that is going to be of interest of people who don't like poetry. I don't see the point of it at all. If a primary school pupil had written, I could understand the praise given above. It's lazy, and dull, and apparently written by someone with no interest whatsoever in the English language.

I'm well up for 'kooky'. This is just awful. I lost count of the empty, meaningless, repititious use of "O my lord".

(I wonder if I've made myself clear here...)