My Urohs Paperback – April 17, 2008

I was more than pleasantly surprised, I was amazed by the depth and the emotions I found in her work, as well as some "telling" native feelings. And it's also nice to know what a Urohs is, and what she means by it.I purchased the book without great expectations, but hoping to learn a little about the islanders of Pohnpei, because I have a granddaughter, Nicole, a recent college grad magna cum laude, who is leaving late this month to give the next 2 years of her life teaching native Pohnpeian high school children under the sponsorship of the JVCs. So, yes, I was more than pleasantly surprised with the book and recommend you buy it, for the poetry is far beyond my expectations, and I'm used to reading good poetry - my late wife, Helen Sherry (M) was an accomplished, well published haiku poet.Mike M

A great buy / read!

I’m rating this only because it's required for a review. It could as easily have been 3 stars.This is a slim collection of poetry by an author from Pohnpei, an island in the Federated States of Micronesia. I freely admit to not being a poetry reader and therefore not the best judge of it, but my world books challenge has taken me out of my comfort zone in all kinds of ways and this book was the best option for Micronesia. I liked it best when it talked about aspects of life in Pohnpei and the author’s feelings about her country (having lived abroad but returned).But for the most part I was underwhelmed. This is free verse without any arresting turns of phrase or particular rhythm, so I didn’t see much in it in a literary sense (though I admit to being a skeptic about free verse generally; it seems like the only thing making it “verse” rather than a few sentences or scattered phrases is the insertion of random line breaks). Also, the author uses a lot of Pohnpeian words, some of which are translated in footnotes but many of which are not, which makes it difficult for a foreign reader to fully understand what’s going on. This collection is probably best enjoyed by Micronesian readers.

This star rating refers specifically to the kindle edition of this collection. It is actually a very nice collection of poems, but the kindle version is literally unreadable. Line divisions not preserved, spaces thrown in willy-nilly, the titles of poems indistinguishable from the text (so you can't tell where one ends and another begins), footnotes interposed in the middle of the text; it ends up being just a jumble of unreadable lines and half-lines and the poetry is completely lost. Spring for the paperback, the kindle edition isn't worth the money.