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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Highly luxurious and stylishly designed book that I estimate to be about five inches square.
My copy numbered 5/85.
Appears to have about 36 poems that I intend to comment upon as I read them.
“a) One day this book you hold might be slipcased…”
AMONGST THE ELMS
“ensuring years in madness’ bind?”
These first two poems – with a select line from each shown above that make some sense together?
A yearning for a place between madness and sanity that shares the characteristics of neither. Death and life, too, smelt he.
“war
upon The Mundane, the Known, All Enemies
of the Grotesque.”
Exactly the warcry of the complete produce of the grand romanic hermitage?
Meanwhile, please let it be taken as read that I anticipate all these poems will be darkly allusive, elusive, delusive, collusive, illusive, and more … like this one.
Live a day a day to put a poem in, till my Kingdom Come.
Slosh or slash, with crowhag beak or sunken sheaf, this Du Maurier dream shall spirit you away to lighthouse rocks et al.
“Do swords unthrust,”
A fine metaphysical poem by a mandrake Donne or a garden’s Marvell, seasoned with (or paled by?) Nursery Rhymes.
A striking rhyme-poem, in-your-face Ligottianism, and the only way to do justice to it would be to quote it all here!
To be read aloud and, if this were a just world, it is a poem that would be passed down the generations as a gem of the human condition, if such generations themselves still passed themselves down or, instead, dug themselves deeper, once having read this poem.
A sister poem to ‘Slipcase Edition’, this is a touching unrequited love verse to ‘you’ as a book, I feel.
“Cobbles of the homespun.
where they all turn…”
A strange inchoately sumptuous ditty, a Proustian scene viewed by whatever image of diurnal self you have: be you monstrous, human, avian, whatever…
A half-tactile prose poem treating the bodily nature of the acclimatisable skies elsewhere.
A poignantly defiant need to grapple with this prose as tortured into verse
to be able to empathise with hating someone you once loved
for their becoming a dream-puppet in death?
“It is a film so simultaneously beautiful
yet appalling that it simply cannot be endured.
This aesthetic ruination,…”
You can sense the poet whittling away at the words in the basement of this powerful poem.
FROM:
PHANTASIES JOLLY
PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR R____ C____
QUEBEC
1793
“Tarie tots do slip the sheets”
A nursery rhyme based on history, I guess, and it is just as good as the famous nursery rhymes of my childhood also based on history.
This poem is the ultimate dead monument to once ancient hope – in the strongest incantatory fashion imaginable.
THURNLEY, PART SEVENTEEN
From nonsense Nursery Rhymes to real no-nonsense unadulterated adult darkness, a transition well conveyed, but disguised or disarmed by its apparent nonsense of a title.
MEDITATIONS ON A LIFE
IN LOVE WITH HORROR
“Did someone collect the final breaths
Of the giants of the Weird?”
The poet does so in this succinct work. Inspiring.
From the various tantalising clues, I suspect this poem is really an old photo from the fin de siecle bringing to new life a distant to-be-loved relative. Why a sunspot? That’s the most tantalising thing of all.
“Open up the vellum flesh”
Poe’s Inkwell – and a praying mantis. Or a preying one?
This is a beautifully nevervescent poem about fairy birds. Probably my favourite poem in the book so far.
an affectation
“Her Angel she saw in a cobalt block”
A corn loom of a poem, with the pretentious affectation of believing it would be read and enjoyed by someone with the time and desire to do so on Christmas Day. Someone who would also make sense of it.
A gradually infected verselet.
I sense it is written by its subject trying to disguise himself as the poet.
A startling poem with its last four words.
A poem you can’t explain to others why it is so powerful, other than to tell them to read it for themselves. Reading with their eyes.
“Bury me with my rarest books,”
Rusty dreams, rusty being embedded in rarest and bury.
This is a poem continuing this book that is making me fall in love all over again with poetry.
A quality piece of nonsense verse that would have fitted well into the much loved Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhyme book during my childhood.
“Story-boarding his life gave him more pleasure
than living it.”
It is perhaps ironic that, as far as I remember, this witty poem is the longest one so far in this book.
And it’s also telling that my life is almost certain to end when I am still partway through a real-time review of a book as I am always in this state of literary incompletion,
FIELD NOTES
Another fine incantatory Nursery Rhyme that I am pleased figures, inter alia, the Lincoln Imp that I once sought in a cathedral.
“It is a non-dairy world”
A nifty diatribe against those who milk joy from life.
A non-diary world? Language screams indeed.
For use in Poe’s inkwell – with Poe being dead?
Polished pearls are polished pearls whoever gets them for you, whoever polishes them.
The same with life itself? Means and ends in Wonderland.
“You build a tombstone each day you live”
A wise poem about life against monuments, perhaps tongue in cheek, but exhilarating. But then I thought of that dead monument to once ancient hope.
An inkident with an inkwell, not Poe’s this time, but one that tracks the naive path towards death, leaving not even the legacy of what you had written!
Weeping made to feel literally like vomiting up creatures from a locked cage In your heart,
“You walk backwards, you daydream at night,”
Unmooring as one’s own ghost ship, towards death as delirium – or joy.
Some more haunting phrases here, making me think that writing is a form of a haunting, when done well,
“Soft apples, purchased knowing that they
would be uneaten,”
“Is it not wiser to cut holes in misshapen
traveling bags?”
Probably the most allusive, elusive, illusive trail of images and emotions leading like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs to the home in the heart. Or sand in a timer.
“…any pale vampire
creature…”
One who died today, but still lives on a blackstar.
The King in Yellow, or the thin white duke?
Ruination in bloom.
Was this whole exercise necessary?
I hope not.
This poem implies that only the unnecessary is necessary.
I wish I had known that all those weeks ago.
This is the perfect unnecessary poetry book and I recommend it to those of us who have found themselves coming over all unnecessary.
The book’s excellent design and pull-out artwork notwithstanding.
“At what point was my madness assured?”
On page 36, I suggest, where it mentions BRAIN SANDWICHES.
end