Book Review: 'Pneuma' by Faye Alexandra Rose
Can we review our own publications? Sophia thought it was okay to do so, so who are we to disagree?
Written by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos
I am beyond excited to write today about a very favourite poet of mine (and this I don’t easily say,) a good friend and a kindred spirit, whose outspokenness and support has come to mean a lot to me as a young writer and poet. I met Faye through my prompt poetry work for Small Leaf Press, and I came to know her more through our honest conversations about the struggles of writing and sticking to a routine to get your work out there. Today, I’ll be critiquing her first chapbook, published by Sunday Mornings at the River—Pneuma—which, truth be told, is an exemplar of contemporary poetry, a gem of originality and poetic sensitivity that deeply resonated with me.
Pneuma is an experience. Linguistically, symbolically, literally. While reading the chapbook, I felt each breath waiting a bit more to be released, each pound of my heart staying for a little while before it echoed in my body. It is the poet’s aim, after all, to establish breathwork as the sole theme of her chapbook. She writes in her Foreword:
Poets often recognize the importance of breath in their work but […] few make it a thematic concern. I wanted to centre the collection around experimentation and breathwork within poetry—not being limited to just the biological process but carrying the emotional context through non-verbal utterances and paralinguistics.
Thus, she includes four different thematic units—Spiritualism, Anatomy, Illness and Memories—and with each poem, she deconstructs the human being in the most lyrical and humble way. In ‘Beneath the soil,’ she uses metaphor to speak of the persona’s grief of losing a family member:
the breeze could no longer sway her stem/ as the flower beneath her ribcage fell.
Whilst in ‘My breath, my song’ she uses punctuation marks, a chorus, rhyming, and five verses of equal length to elevate the ability to breathe into something symbolic,
Breath is a beat/ and all that are living are tuned in its beat/
breath is love and it is a song that is played longer than our bodies shall live.
The mundane with the cosmic. The meek with the divine. Rose weaves poetry that connects two opposites of the same line to transcend the constraints of written speech, and with her vivid imagery and poetic world view, she finally reinforces the lovely idea that mortality should be praised.
In ‘Slumber,’ we fall in love with the persona’s favourite human being:
I watch as his chest inhales to a peak/to then fall silently during slumber.
I thank the moon for creating his waves/ crashing along the shoreline of our bed
the duvet spills from underneath his legs/ as he goes to rest them on top of mine.
Notice the choice of words here, ‘waves,’ ‘shoreline,’ ‘spills.’ Breathing tunes us with nature, and breathing makes us fall in love. It is why we live and prosper and despite the fear of getting sick, wither and die, Rose celebrates this same fear of mortality by a coalescence of nature’s power and breathing.
Her ‘Illness’ section is one of the most honest and confessional moments in Pneuma. She openly discusses fear for COVID, sleep paralysis, panic attacks, anxiety, asthma and OCD and many more psychosomatic afflictions from which millions of people worldwide suffer (including myself.) Afflictions that have been dramatically increased due to COVID anxiety. Her work in ‘OCD’ which distinguishes the words of breath, inhaling, coughs, air, sending them to hang from the line, consists an excellent example of clever formatting to highlight the way OCD symptoms relate to breath.
A similar experimentation that rests on the effect of blanks in poetry happens in ‘Asthma’ where each line feels like it’s being uttered using an inhaler. In ‘Anxiety,’ a piece of work that highly resonates with my personal experience with intrusive thoughts and generalized anxiety, she utilizes a combination of eleven and twelve lines and five verses, whose length looks almost similar. The chants ‘it scratches at the cotton reminding me that is still there’ and ‘it scares my lungs into tightening as I gasp for air” intermingles the basic medicine equipment with human anatomy. Rose creates a space outside written speech where she perfectly combines the human condition of living and experiencing with anatomy so that she can speak truths about mental health and human trauma.
She insists on this tendency in her ‘Anatomy’ section too. She beautifully redefines the organs inside the chest that support breathing. Lungs turn into roots like the apple tree in [her] mother’s garden. The breastbone pumps water around the home, which is the heart. The diaphragm is a parachute, and the mouth is a tunnel where the air can travel/ like the Eurostar from London to Paris. Finally, the nose is like a vacuum cleaner [..] its suction directs the crumbs into the lungs.
Short poems, prose-like, lyrical and with a purpose: the underlying theme of breathing takes root inside you and urges you to realize the importance of mortality. The reason we are born and we die.
With that, I’d like to end this review by referring to the last work of the collection, the heartfelt and heart-breaking ‘Wilson’s Last Breath,’ which confirms the high level of experimentation the poet has accomplished. It feels like a self-reflective, autobiographical piece of prose that takes us back to the last moment on Earth of the persona’s grandmother. The persona’s mother confesses that she felt the last breath of Wilson when hugging her. And then, the tragic reality, the one that binds everything together in Rose’s chapbook, but also acts as therapy for the reader, breaks out:
My mother always describes that moment as an honour. To guide Wilson’s last breath toward the other world, and it reminds me that life is precious, for our breath holds our fate in its arms.
I will not lie—I was both broken and redeemed when reading these lines. The truth of it, the classic oxymoron of the beauty of life in tandem with the tragedy of death, the reminder that what we have now is precarious yet precious because of the inherent ability of our heart to pump blood and our lungs to generate breathing, the selfless acceptance of this truth and our moving on… I’m trying not to tear up while writing this now.
For the way Pneuma stayed in my heart, and the way the poet coaxed my fears and tucked them to sleep safely next to me, for the humble tone she adopts to approach such serious topics, for her natural writing style that is emotive and whimsical, when I say that Rose’s poetry is life-changing, I mean it with every breath I take.
SOPHIA-MARIA NICOLOPOULOS is a Content and Publishing Editor from Greece. She's also an aspiring writer and poet. She chooses to see her writing as the kind Ophelia would write had she navigated a world of boundless horror. She’s currently writing and editing a series of folklore horror short stories and her first chapbook. In her free time, she removes cat hair from her clothes.
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