Thoughts Fall like Rain

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

In Thoughts Fall Like Rain Lebanese-born Albert M. Jabara explores relationships, poetic angst, religion, and other topics of worldly relevance in more than 50 poems. Jabara writes sincerely and adamantly about important issues, but he is seldom able to make a poem work by his good intentions, and the book is at best ambitious but, for the most part, unconvincing.

The 37-year-old Jabara, who was raised and educated in Canada, is a hard worker, but most of his well-meaning poems are sloppily written and poorly thought out. Almost every poem offers a jarring image or muddled metaphor that makes it clear the author hasn’t stopped to think about what he is writing. The book is filled with unintentional non sequiturs. In “Angry Poet” he writes:

In another poem Jabara describes both flesh and bones as “tender, sturdy, sensitive, enduring.” In “The Jealous Sun” the sun turns into ugly hawks which bite, burn, and slice “the little ones with torches of frozen flames,” Jabara’s eagerness to say Something Meaningful is tortuous throughout this tawdry collection. His exhaustive use of capital letters left me exhausted: the Dark Clouds, the Children of This Land, and yes, even the Sea of Mud (from which love was rescued) appear to stir up trouble in poetry land.

Beware of the publisher’s note which prefaces the poems: it promises writing that “stands alone on the summit of all that is fine in World poetry.” Jabara’s work stands alone all right, but his pen (to use one of the author’s own desperate and clumsy attempts to find a striking image) is “trapped in a muzzle.”