I got this book in May 2025, and I picked it up sometime last year to read in the main reading chair. As you might know, gentle reader, I will often have a poetry book or chapbook beside the chair for times when I’ve reached a stopping point in a prose book (end of a chapter, end of a book), and I’ll read a short poem or two before heading up. Over the course of the last year, though, I’ve started reading poetry in the bedroom immediately before turning in, so chapbooks and the like have languished on that side table downstairs. It did not help that the material in this book is rather repetitive. But instead of returning it to the unread stacks when clearing the side table, I moved it upstairs and read it in between copies of Ideals magazine since the stack I have up there is mostly Mother’s Day issues and that, too, can be repetitive.
The poems are very Christian, with definite references to Christ, salvation, the crucifiction, and so on. It’s 156 pages’ worth of them, mostly three eight-line stanzas each, and only a couple of them do not deal directly with seeking or helping others find salvation. A couple of interesting metaphors in them, and a few of them might seem almost hymnal–I am going to share the book with my beautiful wife who would like to write some hymns in case she can get any ideas about them. The book is inscribed (but not to anyone), and a second cursive hand has a couple of notes at the end of a couple of poems describing how the poet got the idea for the poems. So perhaps she gave talks or readings as well.
The little wingdings marking the end of each poem kind of look like QR codes to 21st century eyes. The paper is a little shiny/inexpensive, and the typography looks more typewritten than National Guard memos leaked to CBS News (22 years ago, gentle reader! 22 years ago, when this blog was young) and includes some bold type which, as you remember, we made by backing up and typing over the same letters a second time (done almost 40 years ago, gentle reader, when I turned in freshman college papers typed on a Smith Corona because the Commodore 801 printer I brought to college was dot matrix without Near Letter Quality mode).
At any rate, pleasant enough when read kinda like a devotional, a couple or four poems at a time. Lyle has a pretty good sense of rhythm, but imperfect–a couple of times, I would have thrown in another syllable to make an iamb–and some end rhyming.
I do not think I will seek out her other work avidly. Well, I won’t order them; but I see that she self-published poetry starting in the 1930s, so antiquarian grandmother poetry is catnip to me, and I’ll pick it up if I can see it priced a buck. And who knows? She was born in Michigan and is buried in Oak Brook, Illinois, (and her grave marker says Poetess, Author of “Treasures of Truth) but at least one book made its way to southwestern Missouri. Even if I put Poet on my marker (or my kin do it for me), I will not have had that reach. Also, I see her work appears on a record (Devotions In Poetry With Stan Cook, Vol. 1, recordings from an old radio program). Jeez, Louise. With any chance (and perhaps but a single other purchase), I’ll be the biggest collector of Lyle (married name: Melone, but she seems to have been known by her maiden name professionally) in Missouri.
