Tides of Light feels to me less like a conventional poetry collection than like a long, shimmering meditation on love, memory, grief, imagination, and human connectedness, arranged as a journey through different “forms of light,” from the prologue through sections like “Radio Waves,” “Visible Light,” and “Entangled Light.” The book keeps returning to the same emotional and philosophical currents: the beloved as mirror, poetry as bridge, memory as a tide, and consciousness itself as something radiant, unstable, and shared. The prologue makes that ambition plain by treating poetry as a way of riding emotional waves and finding “a safe shore,” and the later “Entangled Light” section sharpens the idea into a worldview, where perception is always partial and truth arrives as reflected light rather than certainty.

Verde Mar writes as if feeling deeply is itself a moral act, and I found that moving. Again and again the poems reach for tenderness through images of eyes, rain, music, moonlight, tides, memory, and desert light, and when that imagery lands, it lands beautifully. Pieces like “Only Your Eyes Can Stop Time,” “The Shared Poetry of a First Kiss,” and “Polishing Cherished Memories” have that dreamy, ache-filled romantic charge the book does very well, where longing becomes almost atmospheric and intimacy feels suspended outside ordinary time. I also liked how often music enters the poems, not as decoration but as structure, as if songs and poems are different weather systems of the same emotional world.

What kept the collection from fully overwhelming me, though, is also part of its identity. The language is lush to the point of saturation. At times I was completely swept up by that incantatory excess, and at other times I wanted a little more silence, a little more resistance, a sharper edit. The constant return of certain motifs can feel hypnotic, but it can also blur individual poems together. That said, I don’t think the book is merely dreamy or abstract. There are flashes of anger and public grief that cut through the romantic and metaphysical haze with real force, especially in poems like “Please,” “American Eulogy,” and “The Fall of the American Empire,” where the voice turns outward and the emotional register hardens. I appreciated that tension. It kept the book from becoming weightless. Under all the cosmic imagery and quantum vocabulary, there’s a very human insistence here on empathy, loss, injustice, and the need to remain emotionally awake.

Tides of Light feels like it’s a book more interested in resonance than precision. It asks to be entered rather than decoded. I don’t think every poem is equally strong, but the collection’s emotional weather is unmistakably its own, and its best passages have a bruised, searching beauty that stayed with me. I’d recommend it most to readers who enjoy lyrical, image-rich, philosophically inclined poetry, especially anyone drawn to love poems, meditations on memory, and language that wants to sing before it explains. It’s a book for readers willing to drift a little, and be changed by the drift.