Saudade: Unlocking Agape

Rashid S. White is a true poet who has created within this book of poems a journey that today’s everyman who has suffered the touch of abuse and the walk of shame within the bottles emptied and has come out to the need for more answers that sometimes we do not find and sometimes we do not wish to find.

He is the careful lover who dances and becomes the lover he wishes to be. He is kind and yet he feels destroyed by his journeys where love can destroy all of us. Lines like: ‘Silence still talks…’ evokes the need that we all need and that need, and desire is to be loved without condition and without the hardships of lies and deceit where the lover often finds themselves. He takes us into the corners where love sits, and it waits as if we know this and he does he knows this and allows us to devour the words: ‘I love you…’

Rashid’s love for his mother and his family deepens the words he uses to show us the pretty life in a family torn by violence: ‘I’ll revive all her fibers…so that she maintains her appearance.’

This is a book I would love to own, and it would sit upon my desk with all the other books of poetry and it would be near me when I need to let go of my own pain and read the words of Rashid White a true voice, a true poet. – Joseph Dandurand | Native American Canadian Poet