Here Is the Song I Bring

by Melissa Wood

This is a book that follows flowers and the seasons and paces the seasons with the ages of the life, beginning with molecular prebirth and ending with aging and death. Melissa is the accordionist with the Rosendale Improvement Association Brass Band and Social Club. She has had poetry published by Silver Birch Press. This is her book of eco poems about herbs and flowers. She studies etymology, builds sculptural and functional objects, and is a multi-instrumentalist. She lives in New York's play land, the Valley. She teaches English language arts. You may view her poetry and essays at honeybeewood.wordpress.com.

120 pages, Paperback

Published October 18, 2016

About the author

Melissa Wood, a middle child of five, the daughter of an archeologist and a banker, grew up poring over the illustrations of Charles Addams and James Thurber, hoping to one day illustrate a book of her own. The family motto: "Education First" brought Melissa first to the following halls of learning:

Education:
Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa: English Literature major, with minors in History and Art
The School of The Art Institute, Chicago: Art History
Harrington College of Design, Chicago: Interior Architecture, Design, Color & Space Planning

Here is the potpourri of work that kept her student years flush with pocket money:

Odd Jobs:
Several odd jobs on the way to her big career included short order cook at a scary biker bar, waitress at a golf club, operating a Heidelberg Letterpress, running her own catering company, a stint at Great America at the "Yukon Do It Sandwich Shop", and several rounds of retail sales in clothes, furniture and housewares.

Sated and then some by learning, Melissa finally landed in the world of Architecture & Design:

Career:
Tilton & Lewis, Chicago
OTA Architects, Chicago
Gelis & Associates, Chicago

Then came marriage, the first of three babies, and a shift to life in freelance design, veering into the accidental creation of a fledgling note card company:

M. Wood Studio
"Notes Worth Sending Around the World"

Eighteen years and Oprah's Favorite Thing later, she ditched the notes and focused on freelance illustration projects, delighting to see her sketches atop products sold at fabulous retailers, including:

Crate&Barrel, Framed Art Prints
Garnet Hill, Children's Holiday Bedding
Trader Joe's, Greeting Cards

Not unlike the Beatle's song, it's indeed been a "Long and Winding Road": After over two decades of toiling in her cottage industry while raising three terrific children, countless dogs, and a handful of cats, she's finally done it!

Melissa Wood, Book Illustrator

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I very much liked this collection of poetry. I felt a connection to the authors choice of subjects & arrangement. Lovely!

[Shannon Blake · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway in exchange for a review.

Firstly I just want to say how much I admire Melissa Wood for self-publishing a book, I have also done so (under a different name) and I know how much work they can be. I did, however have some issues with the book first being the font choice. The lowercase/ sentence style works beautifully, but there were some lines written in all-caps that I couldn't read, the last two lines of Mycology for example.

There were a few things I didn't understand, for instance in the poem Burning Down the House there is a line that reads 'where corporations are teople poo' rather than people too. I am unsure as to why Wood wrote that. Sure the poem is about the burning down of a library and 'teople poo' is a slogan found on shirts discussing dyslexia- but if that is the reason it still felt like an ill-fit. There are really odd lines throughout the book such as 'Hemerocallis is really know how to cooperate' from a poem called Day Lily, I Love You. Hello, Goodnight. I was also curious about the poem I Want and whether there was a reason why the word 'I' was a capital in some lines and lowercase in others. I don't think it's necessarily incorrect, because in poetry the writer does have a lot more freedom to make the words look how they want on the page.

I liked some poems more than others, and would like to name Feng Shui, Rosemary and Home as particular favourites. But some of the poems jumped around a little, I think Train Song is a good example; it starts off as a rhyming couplet then stops, and then picks it up again as though the writer couldn't make up her mind.

It is difficult for me to sum up the book as a whole, the poems seemed somewhat mixed and designed to be read in isolation.

[Steph · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book as part of a goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review.

I found that the font made things difficult to read at times.
There are some beautiful poems in this collection but some I couldn't quite understand what the author was going for.