Review - Wild Strawberries

Wild Strawberries
By Eric Greinke
Presa Press
ISBN 978-0-9800081-1-1
$15.00

Coming across them
Unexpectedly, as
A child, they
Taste as fresh
As red. Hard
To collect enough
To bring home
For jam, so we
Eat them while we can

Wild Strawberries, that’s exactly what each poem in this collection is. In the opening poem, "Heart Berries," Greinke writes:

Indians called them
Heart berries
They ate them
At the beginning of summer
To make them brave
For the rest of the year.

This brings to mind how the words of a poet can be inspiring and lend us strength through difficult times. Even in such dark and violent poems as "Hard Edges:"

Bloody soldiers lie like sticks
On a hurricane beach

Bionic limbs replace shot off
Branches, grotesque woodpiles

A posse of insane clowns tunes up
Guided by the grinding wheels of half-tracks

Shells scream through the morning mist
Black smoke swirls over abandoned boots

We’re still marching in perfect order
Into the red-stained funeral song.

This one passage can have so many different meanings to different readers. And the imagery is so intense I felt as if I was on the battlefield.

The author cannot be indentified by his poems, rather his poems identify him. He doesn’t write in one particular style or mood. The tone of his poetry is as varied as the topics he writes about. He writes of his memories, of nature, of everyday life and does so in a manner that brings out the essence of being human and transports the reader to the mystical place that resides in each poem. Whether "camping on the edge of the open sky," or "on a path of glacial footprints," or even at Whitefish Point Light where "sailors’ ghosts sometimes appear as whitecaps in broad daylight, trying to rise above the surf that tore them from this life."