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Poets and Poems: Ollie Bowen and “On the Occasion of a Wedding”

By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Apple Buds Ollie Bowen

The ancient Greeks taught the existence of three kinds of love. Eros is intimate love, including the kind caused by infatuation. Philia is brotherly (or sisterly), the kind felt toward a close or best friend. And agape is a more general love, bestowed freely on someone regardless of whether or not a relationship exists.

Poet Ollie Bowen embraces all three kinds of love in her debut poetry collection, On the Occasion of a Wedding. Dedicated to a couple as a wedding gift, the collection of 74 poems is drawn largely from her own marriage. Bowen engages with the spiritual, physical, emotional, and mental ways two people can experience and express their love for one another.

Love’s poetic range is as deep as it is wide. Bowen writes of love as wildly passionate, candid, frightening, occasionally drunk, reverent, admiring, demanding, territorial, expansive, even porcupine-ish. And this rings true; this is exactly what love is like. What makes the collection ring even more true is that even though Bowen cherishes married love, she does not idealize it.

The poems make full use of the natural world as metaphors for love—the sea, the beach, the moon, monarch butterflies, flowers, even a jellyfish. They describe the sensations of color, taste, and touch. They move the emotions of love, like passion and anger. And the reader finds that love can be certain and uncertain, often simultaneously, and can surface in the most surprising of ways. Even with thistles.

On the Occasion of a Wedding BowenHis Thistles

All she could do
was wait for his rain.

It never came.

She planted dahlias
so thistles would not grow,
but without rain,
dahlias would not grow.

So thistles grew,
thorned and noble,
and the goldfinches and
fritillary butterflies came,
humble and pained.

He brought more love
than she’d ever known,
when his thistles came.

Ollie Bowen

Ollie Bowen

Bowen is a poet, author and scholar, with degrees in education, business and science (although she says her favorite subject is rhetorical argument). Raised in Alabama, she currently lives with her family in northern California.

On the Occasion of a Wedding reminds me, a bit, of the famous love passage in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, starting with “Love is patient and kind, love does not envy or boast,” and so on. The saint was writing about the agape form of love, but it can apply to eros and philia as well. Bowen writes about all three, and it feels like something of a celebration.

Photo by Mike Deal, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Glynn Young
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Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he recently retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
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Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, love poems, love poetry, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Comments

  1. L.L. Barkat says

    July 30, 2019 at 12:27 pm

    What a lovely poem. I especially liked the stanza that opens “So thistles grew, /thorned and noble.”

    Are all the poems in the collection as good as this one? 🙂

    Reply
    • Glynn says

      July 30, 2019 at 1:51 pm

      Yes, they are.

      Reply

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