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A Book of Common Flowers - iUniverse
(December 18, 2024)

A collection of forty common flowers comprising of watercolor image, botanical history, photo and a prose poem. The watercolor is a soft rendering of the flower, followed by a brief botanical history and possible place in mythology, literature and sometimes pop culture. References range from Longfellow, Shakespeare to more contemporary sources diverse as Tiny Tim, Debbie Reynolds and Helen Keller among others. The photo captures intricate beauty of the flower, often resembling a painting. The section closes with an irreverent, sometimes erotic or humorous, prose poem commentary on the flower. This is the author’s first venture into poetry, his previous work consisting of three novels and a book of short stories. He describes this new genre for him as finger painting with words, a form of stream-of-consciousness, without the restrictions and structure of traditional poetry.

Reviews

Reveiw from Booklife.com

A Book of Common Flowers

by Tom Baker

Baker’s poetry debut, following the novel Green, is a botanical collaboration that pays homage to common flowers through delicate watercolor paintings, photography, and prose poems. He structures the collection around the four seasons, offering historical overviews and poetic references for each plant, alongside striking dissections of their origin myths and religious imagery interwoven with erotica. Baker describes his poetry as “finger painting with words,” blending casual observations of ancient medicinal cures and remedies with veiled references to darker happenings, as in the “spider fingers weighted with rubies” that caress and cajole in “Dogwood.”

“Some say Easter Lily was born from Eve’s tears, fleeing the Garden of Eden in disgrace, apple core between her thighs,” Baker writes of the Lilium longiflorum, evoking the famed figure in Genesis while drawing a parallel between her sexual nature and that of the Easter Lily. He attempts to unify concepts that so often have been presented as oppositional—the natural, the sacred, the profane—through such allusions, using subversion to interrogate cultural norms and societal understanding of sexuality. Many of those reflections grow deep roots from Baker’s history with the Catholic Church, as he sifts the purpose of “Jesuits in Tuscan monasteries pray[ing] for reincarnation while daily masturbation sends frustration in isolation” and Sunday offerings disrupted by wanton passions.

Bob Adams’s impressionist-style watercolors are soft-edged, iridescent still lifes that offer a charming visual companion to each of Baker’s pieces, while Charlie Carroll’s photographs provide a stark contrast with their meticulously staged renderings of each flower. Those conflicting visuals reflect the diversity of human perspective in observing nature and ourselves, much like Baker’s realization that his writing allows him “great freedom working with words far from the confines” of more standard fare. Though the prose poems here sometimes lose structural cohesion in their chaotic form, the end result is as unique and affecting as the lush blossoms pirouetting across Baker’s stage.

Takeaway: Prose poems honoring the beauty and passion of flowers.

Comparable Titles: Ross Gay’s “Throwing Children”; Frederick Seidel’s “Hymn to Aphrodite.”

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-

About Tom

Tom Baker

TOM BAKER

Tom Baker is a graduate of the College of William & Mary. He enjoyed a successful career in the advertising world, winning many awards for the ads and commercials he produced. He segued from advertising to publishing and for many years was Travel Manager of Reader’s Digest, contributing more than 300 pages of content annually. After 42 years of living in a Santa Monica Canyon tree house, he relocated to his roots in New England and now resides in Gloucester, MA on Cape Ann.