Book review Poems of Love and Hate by Julia R Barrett

How well do you know your friends on Twitter. You may never have met them and they might even be a well established author of a particular genre, that might not altogether be your cup of tea, but you have looked at it and that too has given you preconceptions of 'your friend'.

You have read her numerous blogs and found her to be funny, laughing out loud at her take on events in her life, even when they have been excruciatingly painful, as they happen to her, and she clearly sees the funny side of them too...

Then you have conversations with her and her friends on twitter and they make you laugh till your sides hurt and damn them (metaphorically only of course) they make you laugh so much you have to reach for the asthma pump...  So you've got to know her pretty well as a distant un-met dear friend.

Then out of left field she tells you in one quicky post (no I didn't feel used, that's what blogs and tweets can be quickies) that she is going to publish a book of poems and suddenly it is there and you take the day to read through them and you think... hell. I don't know this woman at all.  These are good. They are quite painful, the book is entitled  "Poems of Love and Hate"  by J.R. Barrett......

You wonder if the woman you have a dialogue with is on her 'second' attempt at life as the life she writes about in her blog bears no resemblance to the life she writes about in her book of poems.

You wonder if she has experienced the highs and the lows, the extreme love and the extreme pain that so often can be the flip side of that thing we call love, why 'Becuz' it's  all there in those 18 poems  and then you see some traits of your own contained in those poems and you wonder, 'are we all like that''

I used to,  'just sit there with your sports section And your bowl of cereal As if you're entitled And I'm Not'

I know this but I changed .... and became better, I hope for the change

But then you read, I remember the evening You beat me    Because YOU spilled the orange juice .....

Is this the same woman I have known for only a few months but it feels like years?  Well apparently it is and I don't know her half as much as I should and neither do you....

But you can rectify that easily by having a look at this moving tender and sometimes painful work of poems by an extraordinary woman   Julia R Barrett and her book Poems of Love and Hate

Available on Amazon US here and Amazon UK here

Outstanding