Alex Balough reviews An Overdose of Meditation in Verse-Virtual – An Online Community Journal of Poetry.
Irene Mitchell’s latest book of poetry, An Overdose of Meditation, is perhaps her most accessible and personal. Her ninth collection explores changes in the world and changes in herself, using her own clear direct voice, eschewing ambiguous metaphors, unwieldy grammatical constructions or hiding behind flimsy personas. Mitchell gracefully, humbly and humorously ponders the meaning and value of life’s moments and memories, and implicitly invites readers to use her poems as a springboard for their own personal explorations. In “Strife Over Trifles” she sets the stage with an image of the landscape she will venture into at the beginning of our journey: Clamshell gray, beak yellow. Hard to tell this gull from that for the shoreline is foreign in fog, an indistinct scene of orts and fragments. There she uncovers no great truths but rather “…a teasing glitter, a vague priority … which insinuates something else.” Similar perhaps to life, the collection is about the journey and the desire for illumination, rather than the epiphany itself. Mitchell’s heuristics uphold a unique formulation that serves to guide her investigations.
