REVIEWS for THE MOST SECRET WINDOW

When you pick up The Most Secret Window you must be prepared for some of the most beautiful as well as brutal words you have ever seen in print. This poetry truly is a weapon. These words will pierce your soul, your bloody beating heart, and be forever imprinted on your mind....

READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW by Katie McNeill AT BLOGCRITICS MAGAZINE

 Evocative Fantasy of Phantom Love, February 1, 2007

"There is a certain kind of love
That can seize without surrender.
A love of such violence, so beyond control,
That one cannot withdraw, once stricken."
~ pg. 12

Many novelists and poets create from a mingling of two worlds. In fact, to be a writer seems to require the merging of creativity and observations of stark reality. Natalie Vanderbilt takes this concept a step further in "The Most Secret Window." Here, two characters intertwine where few meet—in the mind.

An intellectual game or fate drawing two souls to a romantic destiny? Natalie Vanderbilt paints in snapshot poems with startling beauty, as a fantasy world jolts into reality and lives on the page. One minute we are enmeshed in a dramatic story on the sea and the next we have transcended reality and opened a door into a world of dreams. In this world of imaginings, Grayson and Lara meet.

"I have tasted pure desire,
Drunk it deep past any prayer,
Where its hunger consumes like fire
And its pleasure drives me to despair."
~ pg. 216

As a lover of poetry, I read this book with an added sense of awe and fascination. I love how the story weaves its way through words and births itself in a series of poems. This book should interest you if you love poetry, romantic novels or fantasy. Obsession, humor, lust, impossibility, adventure, longing and fantasy pleasures all mingle together to create a unique magic.

The story seduces you and leaves you wanting more. This contrast between an imagined heaven and reality's death is almost too much for any true romantic to bear. And yet, in this longing there is undeniable pleasure. If there are any weapons here (poetry as a weapon), it is longing that twists slowly in your heart.

~Rebecca Johnson, The Rebecca Review

The Most Secret Window by Natalie Vanderbilt is most certainly a novel, but it is unlike any you have read because it is told in some of the most luxurious poetic language I have read in years. Indeed, its subtitle is "Poetry as a Weapon." It is a passionate story of lovers. The year is 1910 and the locations are San Francisco and Maine. It is told as free verse or sonnets as a narrative of a wealthy shipping magnate in the midst of a battle with a corporate rival who lives both in the reality of his business, his friends, and the woman in his life, but who finds solace in an imaginary lover. All this may seem like so much romantic nonsense, but the great talent of the author is that she uses the story as a platform for some of the most evocative, powerful language put to use as literature. It is simply intoxicating. ---Alan Caruba, www.Bookviews.com

Epic Poetry is almost dead, and Natalie Vanderbilt is planning its resurrection. This is the book for people who think they don't like poetry. This is the book for lovers of mysteries, romances, historical fiction, even ghost stories. This is a fully-realized novel in poetry form. Absolutely amazing.

—Keri Holmes, The Kaleidoscope: Our Focus is You Bookstore

“In a daze that passed with no memory,
Grayson found himself in his room, alone,
The drive through the city, hollow and shimmery;
While sleep hung and preyed on his human bone.
His bedroom gaped with large carnivorous jaws
Open, waiting in the thick lonely air
As if warning against dropping his body’s guard,
Though the featherbed beckoned with a lulling stare.
Sometimes he was too lonesome to set himself free,
To escape in the revel of a privileged life.
That was when Lara, through the ethereal sea,
Enveloped him and ruined his normal life.
She was an obsession, hard to do without,
Although a dream, she could touch him in his mind.

‘I love you, Lara,
I cannot forget you,’
Grayson let down the walls
That he had forced against her.
He steadied himself against what came rushing back;
At least, something did come back,
Love breaking through the crusty depths of fear
And willing itself alive and flaming.
What passion! Rebelling and wild,
Battling and rearing in the blazing fire,
Until an essence fell into droplets
Of a raging, gentle compassion
Fierce with energy. That settled into a form,
And it was Lara, clinging to him.”

**

Told in poetry prose is the tale of two people, thousands of miles apart, who meet in their dreams and fall in love – never knowing if the other really exists. Grayson has a lifelong enemy called Selby who has ruthlessly killed his father and creates havoc to his shipping empire time and again. Selby, it is revealed, is more than a little mad and sadistic as well. Grayson’s good friend Luke worries about his friend’s obsession with the “imaginary” Lara, even while Grayson has a mistress. At one time Grayson sets aside attending to business and goes to Maine in search of her, but Luke interferes, thinking that Grayson is losing his mind. Little do they know how close he was at this time to seeing her and confirming that Lara was more than a dream.

And Lara is in a similar situation as Grayson and yearns for him as well. Grayson decides to forget her and attend to his business and mistress and Lara feels his desertion. ...and so Grayson later cannot reach her again. He is left with his uncertainty and a very dangerous enemy.

**

At first I thought I was the wrong person to review this since I don’t appreciate poetry and never read it. Twice I tried to read this only to put down the book in great frustration. But I tried one last time and made a determined effort. Strange, but once I finally found the rhythm I then read it to the end all in one sitting, unable to put it down. Now I think I am the best one to review it for I can urge others who are not fans of poetry to give this a chance – keep an open mind – and enjoy the strange and beautiful story of a love that could not die. (And wasn’t that Selby a horrid person?)

--Donna Doyle, RomanceReviewsMag.com

THE ENTIRE REVIEW by Katie McNeill, BLOGCRITICS MAGAZINE

When you pick up The Most Secret Window you must be prepared for some of the most beautiful as well as brutal words you have seen in print. This poetry truly is a weapon. These words will pierce your soul, your bloody beating heart, and be forever imprinted on your mind.

In the introduction Robert McDowell, the editor of Poetry After Modernism and Cowboy Poetry Matters, and founding publisher of Story Line Press, describes The Most Secret Widow as a ‘tour de force’ and goes on to say "I first encountered this remarkable project in a workshop at the Taos Writers Conference and quickly realized that I was reading something out of the ordinary. Its American precursors are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edwin Arlington Robinson, the contemporary epics of George Keithley, Brenda Marie Osbey, Fredrick Pollack, and David Mason, and the Irish dramas of W.B. Yeats."

Grayson is a shipping tycoon in San Francisco in the middle of a battle with his arch enemy Selby. What is frightening is that his brutality simply leaps off the page at you. But the contrast between Grayson and Selby is perfect. Grayson isn’t a faultless man. He keeps a mistress, Catharine, out of habit, not love, while professing love for a girl who he has only seen in his dreams, Lara.

At one point Grayson leaves San Francisco to go to Maine, the place where he believes Lara lives. But within an arms' reach of her, Grayson lets his friend and business partner Luke convince him that his mind is going soft. Lara isn’t real and Grayson should come home to deal with business. But Grayson, though he tries, cannot forget Lara so easily.

The story of a love that crosses time and space, breaking down all the barriers that we keep up against the outside world is truly wonderful and well written. What I loved the best though were the sections of the poetry that has nothing to do with the love shared by Grayson and Lara. I feel that anyone can write a love poem to varying degrees of success. Though the whole book was beautiful, and Natalie Vanderbilt was more than just successful, the small views of San Francisco and Maine are what stand out to me.

• Horses of summer days, champagne and new Monets,
  Men who sit in grand libraries and dream;
  Silver and china glass, money and going fast,
  San Francisco struck with the melt of moonbeams.
• Young men adjust their ties and practice midnight lies
  As the old ones sit with their pipes and dream.
  Ladies trade parasols for lace and velvet walls,
  While diamonds lay against their skin and gleam.
• Carriages come and go, dinner after the show,
  While the old ones pour their liquor and dream
  Before the dewdrops call, a teardrop falls,
  For no reason that anyone can see.
• What was it all, that made them ten feet tall?
  They were happiest in the fight, before they’d won it all.
• ---Chapter 29, section I, page 168

Copyright © Random River Press 2007