A Three Drops review
Moonchild Dreams by Nadia Gerassimenko
Moonchild Dreams is a lovely little self-published poetry collection by Nadia Gerassimenko, who has been writing poetry since she was fourteen. According to the author’s website, this book includes work written between 2004 and 2015. Divided into five parts, Moonchild Dreams is an emotional journey carried by a mythical framework, though the overall influence of myth on the individual poems is subtle.
The poems in the first section, ‘Ballads in a capella’, would also be great as song lyrics, as the chapter title suggests. They have a positive spin even when discussing difficult times, and are heavily rhymed. In the poem ‘From a glimpse of you’ it’s easy to imagine the lines “I feel honey in my veins … from a glimpse of you” being sung over an acoustic guitar, and certainly does feel like the heavy-light feeling of new love/lust.
‘Amatoria and Mimesis’ is the second section of poems. These pieces are defined by the senses, and in my opinion can be summed up with the final line “and so we felt” in the poem ‘With eyes’. In this chapter, the poems ‘Love and Imitation’, ‘Tender passion’ and ‘We keep on going’ stand out for their rejection of a perfect relationship, and their acceptance of the difficulties people face in love.
The poem ‘Morphine Dreams’ (in section three, ‘Lost at sea with sirens’) grips the reader with its strong use of memory and dream imagery, and ‘Beauty inside’ (from section four, ‘Gaea’s simple truths’) is a sweet encouragement for anyone who feels awkward and not outwardly beautiful. ‘The woman with the child in her eyes’ is a clever tribute to Kate Bush, and again follows the thread of musical influence running through these poems.
This leads on to section five with its Jungian-sounding title, ‘The private self’, which includes the poem ‘Chaos unto harmony’, where the poet works in titles of her favourite songs to express herself. As the name of the chapter suggests, these are all poems about the poet’s relationship with herself, and her inner life. The final two lines of the collection, in the titular poem, sum up the feeling of solace in solitude and darkness, space to be oneself: “The night is mine to keep / when you cannot tame me”.
I would recommend Moonchild Dreams to people who like personal stories and autobiographical writing, as the author is unafraid to reveal her emotions through her work.
Moonchild Dreams is available on Amazon in the US here, and in the UK here. If you’d like to find out more about Nadia and her work, her website is here.
