| Reviews by Rosy |
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Rosy's Reviews of RedRoom Authors
THE SPINNING OF ATOMS
Runner-up for the 2010 Oscar Arnold Young Award - Best Collection by a North Carolina Poet. (June, 2010)
As someone from a family with a long naval history, who has relatives lost or buried at sea, I tend to hold my breath when a camera pans below the tideline. So the title of Alex Grant's poetry collection Fear of Moving Water piqued a particular interest. But the metaphor turns out to be nothing so tame. In fact, it is as comprehensive as it could get. The water he refers to is the teeming water of Creation itself, at once terrifying in its awesome potential and benign in its benevolent intent. Atoms that can split are capable of spinning, too. Between these two poles, the prism pivots in light and flashes its crystal miracles. The book opens with this elemental piece, entitled Black Moon: I watch him drag the boat across The poet has adopted a pristine kind of omniscience, not that which stands aloof and plies with observation and revisited emotion, but one that enters subtlely into the 'beingness' (istigkeit?) of his subject. This strikes me as something not quite defined by empathy. By a fluent evolution of images he invokes a new awareness and succeeds in capturing the instant of genesis almost by mood alone. .................................................................... So There is a similar dissolution of flesh and matter to Shelley when he loses himself in the imagery of 'nature' and paints a facsimile of human nature. Boundaries are always permeable. In The Ocean, Bones Flash Like White Stars In Winter... ...The wise man knows that Grant is his own universe whose confines are limited only by the mind and soul's capacity to catch reflections. Memory seems to stir with recognition of the pre-natal element of incarnation. There are no ends and beginnings. We are caught up in a gigantic cyclical force of endless birth, baptism into life and seasons, skin sloughed off, else shed like confetti, a splintering of tooth and bone, the delirium of death throes, whilst the 'random immensity of the world' is a place full of eggs and latent regeneration. The cuckoo sings and all things pervade 'the scent of life'. Meanwhile the life men live is one of stark compression, minutely sequinned with fleeting truths. Firepit sparks fly like lightning bugs, It is all too vast to take on board and there is the danger that the circle, hurling through space, might spin out of control. What's the use of hurrying and harrying to try and keep up? There's Love and Death, and in between, you eat and drink In Fear of Moving Water, Grant has worked hard to make some very complex insights accessible, inspired by an original imagination and instinctive use of language. Some of the poems are wry, some stricken, some bemused. And some humorous, as in the one entitled Giant. The narrator, who says elsewhere: 'Each universe defined by each observer' is smoking a cigarette whilst watching a column of midges at sunset. He decides that 'eight midge seconds equals one of our years' and reflects upon the advancing stages of insect maturity, which turns out to be a brilliant analogy of human experience. 'He spiraled up again, and by the time he'd reached the top, he'd sent all seventeen-hundred of his children to a fashionable private swarm in the upper reaches of a more desirable neighbouring tree.' The poor creature went to his doom with only three-quarters of the cigarette spent! Such minutiae, as well as being entertaining, bring eternity within touching distance. This is a fascinating collection which never suspends the wonderment that can be translated into Hope. 'The taste of mystery never leaves the mouth'. But don't just take my word for it. See for yourself. RJC website - http://windpub.com/books/movingwater.htm
CIRCLES AND ARCS
'To continue one's journey in the darkness with one's footsteps guided by illumination of remembered radiance is to know courage of a peculiar kind – the courage to demand that light continue to be light even in the surrounding darkness.' The quotation is from Howard Thurman and prefaces award-winning writer, Aberjhani's volume of poetry, THE BRIDGE OF SILVER WINGS. For me, it just about sums up the human predicament which he elaborates upon with stunning effect. Haloes, rainbows, the cycle of the seasons and the full spectrum of emotions from love to hate to love are explored in its pages. These verses are packed tight with powerful images that come thick and fast like a blessed assault upon the mind and heart. They ring with philosophy, with compassion, with hope and with tokens of resurrection. And they are sometimes barbed with challenges, as in Angel of War: Does the potential for peace make the reality of hate sweeter? And in ANGEL OF HEALING: Dare to love yourself Aberjhani's writing blows the mind and frees the psyche of any rigid assumptions about ancestral heritage. Here, our collective experience is starkly rendered. The transparency of one culture overlays another, and another, to form the daguerrotype of possibilities that is homo sapiens, interacting, almost like the elements themselves, with the created world and modified only by context and its imperatives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in All Night in Savannah the Wind Wrote Poetry. The gale knows nothing of Time. It is a primeval force. It has seen all mankind's feats, frustrations and follies before and is a screeching reminder, 'like knives on fire', of what comes next in the logical gamut of human reaction. '...they [the winds] cast and recast nets of lexicons inside the womb '...wind typed furiously remembrances of Buddha; 'Wind of Confederate blood boiling gray miseries This is the language of the Book of Revelation and it is blinding. With rhythms like these, you might well feel that the Creation of Man was a Bad Idea, one of God's regrettable afterthoughts. As well as the melting-pot of traditions and civilisations, there is a blurring of the boundaries of the senses. We tend to identify them singly but we know they don't function alone. In Sunday Afternoon and the Jazz Angel Cometh, they seem to coincide in an orgasmic reunion which not only celebrates life but redeems it. As history bleeds forbidden light ...In the center of time's thorny labyrinth there you The Poet-Angels Who Came to Dinner is reminiscent of the biblical parable of the King planning a banquet for guests who declined his invitation. He then sent out his servant into the highways and byways to round up the dregs of humanity. It also echoes Christ's feeding of the multitude and the burning inspiration felt by the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus who failed to recognise the stranger walking beside them. Only in the breaking of bread as a guest at their table did they surprise the Risen Lord. In the poem, these presences are termed “Peace-Be-Still” and “As-Goes-Love-So-Goes-Life”. They manifest themselves as the poet prepares his lone and paltry supper, transforming the fare into an epicurean delight. A knock at the door heralds uninvited guests and with a renewed benevolence of spirit, he finds he has much to share. There are harrowing pieces, too. Once Was a Singer for God (remembering Nekia) pays tribute to a gospel singer whose life was blighted by every kind of cruelty and despair, but whose sufferings, the writer says, 'coated your tongue with heaven's favor'. She lives again within the memory of those honeyed vocals which are earnest of her bid for Heaven. No one knew how you transformed ...Was that your mind running naked through the West ANGEL OF EARTH DAYS AND SEASONS A soft dream of green In your hands winter Your flight shines classic - Inside your laughter In your hair oceans Eyes of bright autum Bombs explode gashes Rivers of poets Even when muddy In the dancing fields I have indulged myself and the reader with copious quotation, but there are scores more, just as good and even better. Aberjhani's work repays revisiting again and again. This is surely a sign of consummate talent. RJC Website: http://creativethinkersintl.ning.com/profile/Angelscribe22
THE STUNNED BUZZ OF RESURRECTION
"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. The last is essential." Wassily Kandinsky. It may seem a little odd to begin a review of poetry with a quote about artists, but the Snell sisters don't make such distinctions easy. While each is pledged to keep her own internal boundaries, so that Janet's pictures are not a direct expression of Cheryl's poems, but rather conjure the atmosphere of them, it is plain that both are consummate artists, one with well-honed quill, one with psychogenic brush. The 'heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors' applies equally to 'true poet', Cheryl. Her verses are a riot of color, sometimes named colors from the palette. She speaks of 'blue irony' and 'the indigo moments before bed' and 'alizarin, vermilion, cadmium, red wings beating everywhere at once'. Those who paint, or spend a lot of time in galleries, know how shades of red vibrate and redefine a whole canvas. Then there are the subtler hues, as in the gentle poem, Aura. Small galoshes fracture the rainbow in a puddle.
A spray of seven colors prisms the sky.
It falls back to earth, trailing iridescence around a thin yellow foot it mistakes for the sun. Cheryl's mastery of language is breathtaking, her phrases turned with lancet-precision. The montaging of constrasted images taps deep into the soul and releases elusive truths with the chaste simplicity of oxygen bubbles rising to the surface of a lake. You can feel at one with the unfurling torsion of spring, its sinews newly braced, in Poem With Spring Fever, opening you up to growing possibilities beneath a benevolent sky. The perspectives range from under-your-nose through middle distance to wide blue yonder, with close-up shots that refuse to freeze and leave you on the crest of longing. A broken spider's web is 'a ruination of silk geometries' while 'In the stunned hush of its own snapped strands, the spider writhes and rolls in a ransom of insects.' Hope describes 'how the glazed sky hurled through will feathers will sometimes part like water for one bird.' And who, in love, has never been poised on this precipice described in Closer? Crisscrossed nerves vibrate like colours on a map. My senses are a balcony overhanging the sea's dark watch, its cosntant ticking. I wait, a flicker of light upon the spine, from my high place. The rooms sway, and I know you are near, the train pulling into the station, quick bound down the escalator, eyes on the door, its hinged footing, your hand opening the cab's yellow roaring into the rush-hour surge. This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. I cannot praise it enough and feel privileged to have had the chance to review such a gem. The book is well-produced and does credit to poet and painter on every level. Janet Snell's expressionist art - vaguely reminiscent of Edvard Munch but intensely unique - broods over these pieces, depicting shape and shadow from the hazy layers of the subconscious. These presences shifting through space are the masks we tow our troubled worlds behind. If the title suggests that Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality has been turned on its head, then it would certainly be misleading. This book is life-affirming to a degree and proves the paradox that there is still life beyond the barbed reminders of human transience. RJC Websites: http://shivasarms.blogspot.com/ http://snellsisters.blogspot.com/ |
