Book Review: To Drown as a Cure for Thirst: Poems by Blake Auden

 

As featured on Reading in Bed Episode 58B (Book Review Podcast)

Blurb: The fifth collection from poet Blake Auden, To Drown as a Cure for Thirst, is a delicate exploration of grief and how it affects—and is affected by—time and memory. 

Written in the wake of a global pandemic, the book touches on themes including loss, healing, personal reflection, mental health, and love, even in the face of the things that haunt us. Auden's most personal and deeply honest collection to date, these pages examine the idea that we can overcome what winter has taken, and that to hurt is simply an act of remembering.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

Reviewing Poetry books I frequently find a very different beast to reviewing novels like I do more than anything else really with Reading in Bed and poetry books themselves I have found certainly since the birth of Instagram with writers like “Rupi Kaur” and a number of other similar poets and this is certainly reflected in this book.

Wrote over the global panemic, my wife Amanda and myself brought out our joint short poetry book ‘The Lockdown was all we could see’ and reading this book made me think of very similar emotions we both went through when reading this book which is a book where the writer went through a massive case of reflection.

The starting piece is a great way of starting off this book with a element of looking backwards with ‘Tell me something good’ for example a incredibally stark reflection back before lockdown stating at the end of the piece “tell me the light / is simply our shadow, leaving / that the glinting steel is not a blade’ bringing a lot of memories back of when I was barely able to leave my home for the better part off 6 months.

A Loop which follows with a harrowing line ‘suppose tomorrow is just yesterday / moving’ before then replacing memories with nothing but darkness – making me think of a state of mind whether things were bright or not weather wise – everything was in a completely different state off mind.

Of course with the book being that weighty even though the poems are very sparse, it is not a book you can skip through, I suspect it’s a book that could take some readers months and months to get through because of the sheer weight of the words and considering the world is now hopefully over Covid, it does ask the question why wasn’t this book bought out before to be honest and whether people will want to return to emotions like what the writer was going through here like we all were.

It’s a great book however and I like the fact that the emotion is showed throughout rather than smacked you in the face.

8/10