Robyn E. Budge is in her sixties when she writes the poems in her book, "From These Eyes" and this collection is her way of looking back at life's struggles and sharing her experiences. The poems reflect the different milestones in a woman's life like "Blind Youth," "Menopause Melody," "Once a Mother," "To my Daughter," and "Aging." Some poems are playful like 'Baa baa Lost Sheep', 'Love is a Verb', 'Non Sufficient Funds', and 'Yackin' and Stackin''. 'From These Eyes' is her first poem in this collection, which says, "Interesting how two robins have found/a view in the air and one on the ground." Aptly enough, the last poem in this collection is 'Your Good Night Kiss'.

Lyrical and insightful, Robyn E. Budge's book of poems is like a memoir. The author is telling her life story through her poems and this was what immediately caught my attention as I started turning the book's pages. The overall style of the poems is playful and the mood is light, even when the subject matter is not. The poet's recurring themes are life, love and the choices we have to make as we go through the different stages in our lives. In the poem 'Aging', the author writes: "Aging is not always a graceful thing/ when foolishness and fate hasten its progress." I personally find wisdom in these lines. Also, many of the poems in the book use rhyme effectively like this: "My years have been numbered/ This body is old/ The light’s growing dim/ My breath is getting cold." This is a book of poems that make the readers ponder about their own lives without really intending to and herein lies the success of this book.

"From These Eyes" is a compilation of short poems that touch on many topics such as faith, God, the soul, death, life, heart break, children, aging, weight, joy, happiness, hopes, relationships, and many of life’s events that everyone must go through. The poems range from extremely humorous and silly to profound and deep. The ranges of emotions that are invoked when reading these short poems are far and wide. The poems are written creatively in the perspective of and from “the eyes” of the author and the poems are written from both a female and male point of view.

Author and Poet Robyn E. Budge inspires many emotions in the readers, but I think the most frequent emotions that the author is able to invoke are humor and light heartedness, especially in poems such as 'Forty Two Inch Hips' and 'Low Carbs'. The author writes many of the poems creatively to go with popular songs that you can sing and rhyme. That makes it a fun, engaging interactive experience for the readers to try to read the poems to the melody of the songs suggested. There are many devotional and religious poems that make the reader ponder the meaning of religion and what they believe. The other poems that invoked deep emotion in me centered on aging and dying. The author treated the subjects with sensitivity, humor, and hope. These poems made me ponder many things about life and death, faith and religion, and overall, why we are put here on earth in the first place.