I have about 5,000 books in my personal library, so it’s rare for me to take the time to re-read any of them. However, I keep coming back to “Deflection” by Roberta Beary, published in 2015. Back then, my curiosity piqued with its title, because the word illustrates the pattern of my life, as with the lives of most of us. We veer off course, are sideswiped, our journey  too often knotty.

With less and less time in my schedule, I can’t review books on my blog, though lately, I’ve made a couple of exceptions.

“Deflection” is a book of spare poetry that includes haibun and haiku and tanka sequences. Understatement is so beautifully executed in these poems that evoke so much emotion about subjects including: a failed marriage, caregiving and the deaths of loved ones, child abuse by a person close to the family, the author coming to terms…