“Between Life and Death There is Nature”: A Review of Smoky Zeidel’s Garden Metamorphosis
“Between Life and Death There is Nature”: A Review of Smoky Zeidel’s Garden Metamorphosis (Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2018), ISBN-13: 978-0-9979517-4-5 Smoky Zeidel has a way with words. This five-time Pushcart nominee is able to plumb the depths of human experience with a simplicity of language that makes accessible what the philosophers, rhetoricians, and many poets render (at times on purpose) vague and therefore useless. Garden Metamorphosis is much more than a book of poems (and a bonus short story that rends the heart); it is a meditation made in nature’s Cathedral—the garden. As Voltaire advised in Candide , we each must “tend our own garden.” Gardens have served for centuries as masterful metaphors for the soul, the human condition, and the mystical nature of Nature. Zeidel’s powerful poetry captures this alchemical mixture-in-a-bottle in book form, and the reader is wiser for the journey. Monarch butterflies figure prominently in the collection, in bo...