Bingo Chart Review: Hold Your Own - Kate Tempest



As part of my reading challenge for this year I decided to read a book of poems, as it is a genre I haven’t really explored all that much. I picked this particular collection because it came highly recommended by Jean Bookishthoughts on Youtube. 

For the most part I enjoyed reading this. But I have to say that, as with short stories, I just don’t think poems are my jam. I like small nuggets of wisdom or insights, but as for the longer “story-telling” poems I must say I prefer “regular” fiction. 

The collection is divided into four parts; childhood, manhood, womanhood and blind profit. It sort of has a protagonist in Tiresias, but he doesn’t feature in all the poems, as far as I could tell. A lot of them also deal with Tempest’s own experiences growing up and becoming an adult. I thought most of the poems were fine, but there were only a few that I really liked, including “Waking Up With You This Morning” and “Ballad of a Hero”. As for the rest I just wasn’t too interested in whatever wisdom they had to depart. 

I think some of my issues with especially poems, but also short stories to some degree, stems from the fact that I am not very good at picking up on underlying meanings. Subtle metaphors and hints just go straight over my head, and I don’t enjoy having to dig very deep to find the meaning of a story. Call me shallow, but I read for fun, not to sit for hours pondering over what it means that the shoes are blue instead of red. Not that Tempest has a lot of that going on in my opinion, this was more for poems in general, but still. Poems just aren't really for me. 


I gave this book 2,5 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

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