The Jewel of Verse Ii and La Joya Del Verso

Book excerpt: I come from a family of high achievers and writers. My father, Alfredo Holguin Pombo, was president of a Mortgage Company and vice-president of El Banco de Colombia. He taught me to love poetry; my mother, Beatrice Murray Fairbanks de Holguin Cayzer wrote a newspaper column Buzzing With Bea for the Palm Beach Daily News for a period of fourteen years and four books, including Tales of Palm Beach. My aunt Elaine Murray Stone has written twenty books among them a biography on Mother Theresa. Both my grandfathers were Ambassadors, my cousin Jorge Holguin, may he rest in peace, owned a Theatre Company and wrote books, among them MadreSelva; my great grandfather was president of Colombia. I am related to three other Colombian Presidents, to William Prescott who wrote The History of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru in the 1800s; to Rafael Pombo, my great-great uncle who wrote Nursery Rhymes which are still read today by Colombian children; to Jonathan Fairbanks who built the oldest wooden frame house in the U.S.A. (Dedham, Mass.) and to Empress Eugenie Bonaparte, wife of Napoleon III. I have often wondered how Im going to achieve as much as these and other family members. With these two books of English and Spanish poetry I hope to become a distinguished member of my family. I was married for twenty-two years to the artist Ricardo Morales-Hendry and we have two daughters: Vanessa and Veronica and a grandson, Tristan Anthony Virgo. I currently reside in West Palm Beach, Florida. U.S.A. ***This book was given a 4-star rating by Amazon BOOK REVIEW "A slight collection of lyric musings on lifes grand passions. When the reader conjures an image of poetry, one would imagine the specimens in this tiny volume would come to mind. Morales-Hendry uses traditional verse forms like the sonnet and devices such as end rhyme to convey the ever-classic themes of love and desire for most of the pieces. The only characteristic slightly distinguishing this from the norm of self-published American verse is that the collections second half is Spanish poems, reflecting the poets bilingualism and joint Colombian and American heritage, of which, according to her authors note, she is particularly proud. The English poems brim with emotion, mostly centering on love in its more accustomed formsbetween man and woman, parent and childwith a couple humorous pieces exploring the relations of domesticated mammals (Cookie and Spooky, Love and the Conqueror) tossed in for levity. Some of the love poems are proscriptive, offering recipe-like instructions for relational harmony (The MiniLove Lesson) and satisfying sex (The Love Lesson), while others wax on, painting the page with lots of one-dimensional moons, sky, fire and stars. --Kirkus Discoveries