Bittersweet Chocolate is a collection of poems that plumbs the depths of darkness and despair and then propels itself out of those depths to dwell upon exquisite moments of human existence and ecstatic snapshots of the spiritual majesty of the natural world. The reader that perseveres through the entire folio may find the movement analogous to the attempt of a mournful and determined Orpheus to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld and could also find comparisons with the death and resurrection celebrated by Christianity.
The collection reflects a consciousness of detachment that springs from existence in a rural setting in an age of derealizing technology similar to what is described in the DSM-5.
As a child, I grew up with stories from my grandfather, a Polish immigrant, who stated that he and other men worked the strip mines that bled into the waters pictured herein for a nickel an hour, which was considered a good wage in that era, but led to the bitter, acidic waters that are pictured on the cover. The collection offers reflections upon the contained rage of the human ego, the not-so-friendly games played by man against manand one generation upon the nextthe cyclical nature of many human behaviors, the frailty and limitations of the human condition, as well as man's reach, at his best, to seek for the divine.
It is the author's hope that suffused within will be found a curious mixture of the inspirational, the mystical, the miraculous... and yes, the prideful, the self-serving, the entitled, the spiteful, the suffering, the closed, the rational, the doubtful, the scarred, the tepid and the misunderstood. These poems are compensation for that which we are, that which we do not show, and that to which we can aspire.
