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Lovin Me Always
by Crystal L. Goss
56 Poems ~ 60 pages
Format: 6 x 9 ~ Perfect Bound
Price: $15.00
Publisher: Page Publishing
ISBN : 979-8-88960-880-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 979-8-88960-894-3 (digital)
To Order: Amazon.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
After fifty-five years of marriage, I have much to learn about the art of love. It is with grace and humility that Crystal L. Goss offers solid thinking about love. Her debut collection shares fresh insights that this reviewer appreciates. While I am reluctant, as a reviewer, to simply “sign-on” (no questions asked) with a writer’s point of view, Goss, writes from her heart with no pretense and no hidden social agenda.
Engaging Titles
I pre-read my review collections by perusing their titles. Goss is good with titles. When I read titles such as “All I Ask,” “Are You Too Busy,” “Do You Know How to Love,” “How Things Seem,” “Validation,” “What I Feel,” and “Why Change,” I recall, over the decades, these same questions/themes arising between Trudy and me. They are common to most couples and yet remain as fresh as if they have never been asked before.
Style
Goss writes in a very loose free verse style. I would name it prose poetry as distinguished from formal or classical verse. She writes as one speaking in casual conversation over coffee with a friend. She uses internal rhyme effectively and her work bears witness to music-like cadences that kept me focused on the page. Here is an excerpt from “The First Time”:
The First Time ever I saw your face, I knew I was in the right place. The first time, you held me close, you held me tight. I knew then everything would be alright, I could feel your heart beat, your soul seep, from your body to mine, even though it’s just between you and I, we are going to be just fine.
Note both internal rhyme and alliteration, “I could feel your / heart beat, your soul seep, from your body to mine, … we are going to be just fine.”
Highlights
Excerpt from “That First Kiss”:
That first kiss was like heaven to my lips, I knew you had me the moment you started, oh then how my lips parted, wanting more, and more of you, wanting to feel your whole body against mine, What the Hell, have I just lost my mind?
Even today, in our fifth decade of marriage, Trudy and I often recall that moment when both of our worlds changed forever.
As we drew ever closer to getting married, our thoughts coincided with this excerpt from “A Better Life”:
When you make her life better, She’ll feel like the sun and the moon came
together and made love to each other
Your love and your desire to change things for her makes her want to love
you forever. She’ll think about the pleasure of it all, just makes her want it
all. She’ll take her share of you and do what It do, Love you!
While such idealism is worthy of applause, Goss also knows that, over time, two people in love must grow ever-deeper, ever-more-mature in their respect for each other. This comes out in two stanzas from “A New Us”:
It’s now a New Year, a New You, a New Me, a New Us, and this is where I choose to be, loving you until my heart explodes and my mind goes numb, I just look at you and can feel the love, A Love that shows just how much you want and desire a New Us.
We steal away the moments to share, this is where we show how much we really care, this is where we put all the love that have to the test, we show as much as we can bear and we show all of our best, not to just each other do we love on, but one another we tell how want a New Us.
Lovin Me Always has much to contribute to contemporary literature on love. I have a feeling, unconfirmed of course, that Crystal Goss and her husband are well acquainted this famous Bible text on love:
When I was a child,
I talked like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child.
As adults grow, the verse becomes a unified anthem:
When we grew up,
We put our ways of childhood behind us.
And now these three remain:
faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
First Corinthians 13.11 & 13
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