Title: We Live and Learn: At a Life Pace
Author: Claudia Walthing Andrade
Publisher: URLink Print and Media, LLC
ISBN: 978-1649081773
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 118
Reviewed by: Lisa Brown
Hollywood Book Reviews
A spiritually infused, lovingly created compilation of poetic works, Claudia Walthing Andrade’s, We Live and Learn: At a Life Pace offers a beautiful and impassioned compilation of poetic works which present a heartfelt view of the author’s life journey and the lessons learned.
A victorious work altogether, this collection of poems not only shares author Andrade’s insightful mentation, garnered from her experiences including topics of family, friends, love and school but also brings into focus her relationship with God with relevant, Bible quotes and psalms included at the end of several poems, allowing for a flow of spiritual inspiration throughout the work.
The book has several main sections, which starts out with Family as the first section, within which she includes some very touching odes to family especially the first poem, Mother which paints a memorable picture of the author’s endeared matriarch. Next the Inspirational section provides several engaging works which definitely speak to the soul, in particular I found Good and Evil and Six Elements of Survival to be elementally inciting as well as insightful. However, Gone for a Moment, turned out to be the most memorable in this section, as it offers a poem in which she explores her out of body experience in an operating room, the details of which absolutely shock your system. Subsequently, the following section presents a variety of poetic works related to the memorable experiences of love in author Andrade’s life, here while many poems awaken your heart with her loving excerpts of loving tribute, her poem It Was You, especially engages. Rounding out the book is a section entitled School where the author shares her many fond memories of school and friends through a variety of tribute poems.
Overall, I enjoyed We Live and Learn: At a Life Pace. It was an enjoyable immersive read, through which author Claudia Walthing Andrade’s deeply emotive verses flowed with a deeply detailed sense of gratitude for her life, her experiences and her family, as well as her relationship with God. I found myself immediately engaged from the initial poem and was eager to peer further into Author Andrade’s life as presented via her literate, appreciative lens. However, I did find a few minor points of contention: the need for minor editing for misspellings, as well as display issues as this was a kindle book and the spacing between works was somewhat off, however this did not impede my enjoyment of the book. Altogether, contentions aside, this was a well-done work and I do recommend it to poetry enthusiasts.