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                              A MAGAZINE OF FICTION, POETRY & MORE!
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ISSUE #42
 
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June 2005
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                                   ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM
                        
***BIO*** J.D. Riso was last seen in the South Pacific.  Her writing has appeared in several places, including The Edward Society and The Journal of Modern Post.  Her website: www.jdriso.com.
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Forever and a Day
by Matthew St. Amand
Price: $9.95
53 pages/21 poems
Murphy's Law Press
www.murphyslawpress.com
ISBN:0-9754308-1-5

Review by: J.D. Riso

In his debut collection of poems, Forever and a Day, Matthew St. Amand leads the reader on a nine month journey through an illusory world of conflicting emotions.  His muse is Dierdre, the pregnant, seventeen-year old sister of an ex-girlfriend.  Dierdre is an aloof, mysterious child with ‘a moonsweet stare/long candleflame hair’.  She is a young woman in need of a protector. 

As the calendar pages are torn away, the poet becomes ensnared in his reveries, overcome with a need to rescue this lost child.  He is also tormented by what he feels for her and attempts to escape this obsession.  In Away, an upbeat, yet mournful ballad, her specter has followed him to Dublin: 

I had crossed the ocean
With one honed notion:
            To purge myself of memory

The language is accessible, lyrical, unflinching.  In  Poem after reading Anne Sexton’s ‘The Abortion’ we are told: ‘nobody want to say it’s right/only that it’s sometimes necessary’.  He becomes her moral advisor, searching for ways to help her have a second chance.  All the while he keeps his musings to himself.  Dierdre remains oblivious to his concern and even his presence until the very end of the work. 

And throughout, the whisper: What dreams go on there? It is left ambiguous exactly what he feels for Dierdre.  The frontier between brotherly affection and adult love is nebulous.  As with many objects of unattainable love, no move is made to become intimate with Dierdre. It would shatter the mystery.

Any of these poems/ballads/passages could stand on their own, but together they form a meticulously arranged symphony.  Forever and a Day is a quiet opus of prose poetry.