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Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio for Readers' Favorite
The elegiac latest offering from Rob Vogel, a Dutch-born poet who spent many years in Ireland, is a collection of captivating short poems about seasonal change and grief. Those Grieving Raindrops melds rhymed verse, sonnets, and looser, prose-like pieces with a clear emotional throughline. The collection moves through the different seasons, capturing the brief promise of spring, the warmth of summer, the long decline of autumn, and the cold of winter. Meanwhile, the speaker mourns the loss of love, the consistent erosion of time, and the fading light. The rain, the falling leaves, the moon, and the sea are imagery that return over and over, while sorrow remains the underlying current. In “Raindrops Fall,” the speaker sees “those brief raindrops fall, / As a legend of what a fallen race did befall.” Many poems address a woman who is absent or beyond reach, and others like “Fotheringhay” and “Ériu” ground the grief in Irish history and landscape.
Rob Vogel favors archaic contractions ('tis, dur'ng), the apostrophe, and repeated refrains. He uses the seasons metaphorically: autumn conveys the sense of aging and regret, winter communicates silence and death, and spring is evocative of a renewal that remains elusive. The author uses dreams as a symbolic layer in the poems, and they become a place where desire and memory converge. The moon watches over them while the sun marks that which has been lost. The narrator captures details like dull echoes and vibrations. The sensory details in Those Grieving Raindrops steep the poems in familiar reality and evoke sentiments that are familiar to readers. The most compelling moments are conveyed in image-driven language, as in "Twice," where "the last berries are dripping with rain, as if grieving.” By the final pages, the title's rain has become a convincing echo of mourning itself.
