Words To Breathe By

"She is lounging in sunlight, stretched across a silky white bed. Our celestial work of art has just begun."

Immersed in the imagery of light and dark, sun and moon, Hansen’s work is soothing to the core. From the opening poems, audiences can anticipate the color that is a part of each poem’s identity, and though the pieces are short and simple, their depth is in the thought-provoking juxtapositions of Mother Nature and love.

Hansen sets the tone for the compilation in “The Arriving Night,” where the blue of the fading sky and the red of the burning sun meet, albeit briefly, in glorious unity. While the imagery is stellar, the narrative prose that poems like “Trees” exhibit is just as meaningful in its philosophy: trees that endure all the world has to throw at them, converting tragedy into wisdom and maintaining their immense majesty for centuries. Perhaps where Hansen excels most is taking ordinary objects like “horse of the imagination,” “God’s jewelry store,” or rain, and aligning them with a purely human quality, such as rain being the cleaning or “removal of emotional debris.”

Where nature commands the attention in the first part of Hansen’s work, it is love that consumes the pages of the latter portions. The serene elements of the nature poems give way to the freshness of blossoming love and the pure exhilaration that follows. Many of the poems are undoubtedly an ode to the woman who the speaker wants to love “like God” and who is the reason the speaker feels free from the prison of the mind. Hansen’s work showers bountiful praises on the vivaciousness of the female form as a form of self-discovery, a path to finding one’s self in the midst of the world’s constant chaos. Overall, the poet’s delivery is raw and authentic, allowing the readers to settle in and find comfort in his depictions.

- The US Review of Books

If postcards could be made into poetry, Words To Breathe By is exactly that. Each poem written and collected by James Richard Hansen is a snapshot of nature; some place the poet visited, captured in his memory and brought home to put on page. The collection is imminently descriptive. At one point, Hansen refers to himself as a city-dweller, Californian, escaping into nature and respite. Words To Breathe By recalls exactly that experience.

The nature-inspired poetry in this collection is soft and quiet like a sunset. Then, sometimes, Hansen launches something truly breathtaking; like this from The Road To Happiness, “I was charting my course by the stars but they fell from the sky in an avalanche of light.” Rather than the sense of awe prevalent in most of his other pieces, this one feels like a rawer emotion. The reader is left to meditate as to why this was the road to happiness. There is a riptide beneath the calm surface of these poems, something hinting at darkness. Hiding behind the vacation into solitude is a sense of escapism. Hansen alludes to a recovery which is more than the oppression of suburban routine and California smog.

Words To Breathe By stands out because of Hansen's impressive vocabulary. This excerpt from his piece Stars is an example: “its splendor of galactic lights... the stars a lucent guide illuminating the infinitude of the universe.” Descriptive form is at the forefront of Hansen's poetry. Fellow Californians will enjoy the bold descriptions of their home state, from the sequoias to the sunshine, “the blazing ball slides into the sea.” He also makes pleasant use of metaphor. In fact, often Hansen's metaphors create a more vivid image than his descriptions. His clever metaphor from the poem Orchids, after describing the way each metal makes an eye, is that “each is a beautiful monster, coming closer every day.” Likewise, while somewhat overdone, the metaphor of the sequoias standing as wise old men is one of the more powerful images in this collection. From the poem Trees: “the sequoias... grand old men, advanced in years and showing the effects of age, but strong from a lifetime of nourishment and struggle.”

Each poem is a breeze blowing through trees, the wind across the ocean, the fragrance lifted from a field of flowers. A reader can breathe by these poems if they allow themselves to be transported into a new landscape with fresher air. Each postcard poem in Words To Breathe By inspires the reader to travel and you need not go far. Hansen's poetry teaches us a traveler does not need to wander far afield in order to find beauty, like disappearing into the eyes of an orchid. Words To Breathe By is simply a pleasant collection of nature-inspired poetry.

- Pacific Book Review