Illuminating the Umbra

By John Beach

A collection of 35 poems, mostly terzanelles, exploring how family, work environments, and seeking love have helped shape who I am today: an educator in mind, a small town grocer in soul, and a comic book hero at heart. I can get mired down with the dark of the world, or I can try to do something about it.

The terzanelle is French/Italian adaptation of the terza rima to the villanelle form. The poems are 19 lines long and ten syllables each. The poems are composed of five triplets and a concluding quatrain. I enjoy the puzzle-like nature of this form and the subtlety of the repeating lines, the variations in meaning. I've tried a few variations as well, 16 lines, 22 lines, and non-rhyming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Beach
• Release date: Aug 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476349640

John Beach

John describes himself now as “the evolutionary result of Paperboy to Grocery Store Worker to Professional College Student to Magazine Editor to Computer Night Operator to Jr. Database Programmer to System Administrator to Computer Consultant to College Professor to Dean of Information Technology to Retired Old Guy Who's Really Not Old Enough To Be Retired.” He’s always been around writing and has used it daily in his professional life. He's used it in his leisure time, too, often when he plotted out D&D adventures that he and his players communally craft together around the dining room table and on Zoom. John’s always loved stories, always had them forming, churning, and reshaping in his brain. It wasn’t until he began closing in on an early retirement (for health reasons) that he began to get those stories out of his head and into text documents and then released into the world through ePublishing.You can visit with John on Facebook. He’d love to hear from you regarding his written work (and your hobbies), and he would greatly appreciate it if you could write reviews for his books. Ask him for free coupons if you need them. He only puts prices on his most recent books so that people will take them more seriously. The money’s not important: his stories and poems just want to be read.

Book preview

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