Dark Secrets
Mahinour Tawfik
ISBN 978-1-943270-78-1
http://www,kclpublishing.com/mahinour-tawfik.html
Brought to you by OBS Reviewer Scott
Synopsis: 
A collection of 70 dark poems about depression, pain, sorrow, betrayal and self harm, heartbreak, and loneliness.
Review:
Dark Secrets is many things at once. Despair, hope, death, love, acceptance are just a few of the themes in this deftly written book of poetry. Tawfik, I’d have to admit, paints her canvas very dark – this is a gloomy, depressing journey. As the author herself was clinically depressed and suicidal before finding her love in poetry and that the book of poems written shortly after or during a crisis, one can only imagine the depths of horror these poems cover in the silence between words. These – literally psychobibliotherapeutical – poems run the gamut of Mahinour’s rollercoaster emotions and touch the dark shadows that lie within us all when the light starts to fade to blue.
The book is meticulously well written if, as mentioned before, depressing. It’s not just a book of poems either. It carries an almost prose-like structure in that it is a novel, with direction, split into five chapters, each chapter carrying within it a snapshot of life during a period of crisis, finding love, receiving that first glimmer of hope, and acceptance of this flawed construct of the world the way it is. The depression, however, seems to be Tawfik’s weakness and strength; it takes a lot of mustering up of energy to be immersed in a visual field, through the lenses of depression; yet it is only through this journey that we get these words at all.
The poems, in and of themselves, are well written – not T.S. Eliot material, by any sense of the word – but delightful in their own way. For example they shine in use of diction, the subtle interplay of word meaning, and conveying their individual messages extremely well. Some are bright, some are really depressing, and some leave you hanging by a thread. Collected the way they are, one has a different lens to peer through within each ‘chapter’ of the ‘novel.’ If it’s the structure that first grab the reader’s attention, then it’s the tone of the poems that set the mood, and the echoes of the past tell the ‘tale’ of each stage in Mahinour’s experiences.
As a modicum of psychobibliotherapy is inherent in most poetry, here the reader is hit with the unabashed ‘truth’ in poetry – life written down in the words written, but more importantly, in the words not written. Given that the author suffers from chronic depression, and has been suicidal, one can safely assume that all the poems themes are going to encompass a range of negative emotions and pent up anger, that exposes the bleached white underbelly of the bloated, beached carcass that all people carry deep within. The poems do strike a chord and resonate with the reader but at the expense of writing poignant poetry to an audience that has had similar life experiences.
For the reader who enjoys psychobibliotherapeutic snapshots or simply verse and rhyme, this is definitely a book for you. For the person who doesn’t mind treading the dark recesses of human emotion, this is definitely a sale. Either way Dark Secrets is the go-to for a smaller venue of readers however for people who are going, or have gone, through a crisis or know someone going through one, this book will let you know that you aren’t alone. Everyone should be able to relate to at least one of the poems in this book, as we all have that dark side we keep in check, or have lost control of somewhere in our lives.
