Halcyon Days and Stormy Months

Know about the book -

Halcyon Days and Stormy Months is written by Brian Anthony D'Ambrosio and published by Independently Published. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1095676326 (ISBN 10) and 9781095676325 (ISBN 13).

It's been a joy and a treat knowing Brian D'Ambrosio and reading his spin and swirl of words. Perhaps it's ironic that he would have titled this Halcyon Days and Stormy Months. At face value and at the surface, D'Ambrosio seems quiet, introverted and modest - and he is indeed all these things, well, at times - yet he's consumed by a love of words and always fizzing at the seams with emotion. The first time I met Brian he talked passionately about a female aviator named Katherine Stinson for two hours nonstop only pausing for big gulps of black coffee and to tell me that the white patch in his otherwise red beard could be attributed to "an incident in Oregon." We've been friends ever since. Either he will not return my phone calls and I won't hear a peep or ding from him for six months, or he will call me every five minutes for a laugh-filled two weeks. He is a wonderful poet of soft-hearted and spoken storm fronts. It is not only how he writes these emotions, but it is also how he verbally lines them up and coordinates and juxtaposes, and sprinkles. The heart "has blonde hair, but we see dark roots." That's a microcosm of D'Ambrosio's ability to shift his alert and astutely poetic mind to the realm of the unique. Another thing I believe readers will enjoy about this collection is the lack of structure within the poetry. If it takes him three lines or twelve lines to complete a thought, he takes it. He knows where he is going and how long it'll take for him to get there, and he's immersed in the vulnerability and candidness of the ride. Whether it's a lady who keeps "tattoo artist's hours" and another who "sported pens that shot poison ink," or his self-identification as "a novel whose pages were out of order," it's all a great insight and great play into D'Ambrosio's observation of language. There are poems about initial love (Claire and I Both Jump), and fighting through its resolute disdain (Dark Wells Beneath Blue Eyes), and ones about the poet's notebook observations (Heard But Not Seen), and the boredom of company you have no heart to keep (Melon Grinds and the Old Car Wreck).You were every passage that was ever worth underlining in the hard land of formfitting snap-button western shirtsFour lines. Forty emotions. Four thousand possibilities. There are poems within poems and the poet's ability to give the passion a home. I mean, how perfect to drop the line, "she's the reintroduction of native grasses" into something so flattering and repurposed. Lucky for us, Halcyon Days and Stormy Months is, as he writes in one selection, all "fire and flurries," and it's crammed with an unbroken string of both. Danielle RogersPoets & Writers MagazineApril 1, 2019