Of One Pure Will – Farah Rose Smith
EGAEUS PRESS MMXIX
My previous reviews of this author here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/farah-rose-smith/ and this publisher here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/egaeus-press/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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IN THE ROOM OF RED NIGHT Farah Rose Smith
“And the swarm! To pursue the memory is to pursue that familiar delirium of a forgotten world. Savage beasts that would not hide their wings, living as men until the moon shattered.”
A highly dark-poetic (incomparable and constructively untranslatable to sense logic)) transfiguration of swarm theory and human words, resonating by chance with the inverse falconry using humans, in ‘Flock’ (reviewed yesterday here) and the vision from underground of one of the Rust Maidens, now to her nth power — a densely word-powered vista of possibly how I see the precipice of Brexit and the Trump as ‘Meiser’ too, but really, as I said before, paradoxically, this work does not represent these things at all, untranslatable, as human beings in diaspora within an unrecognisable mythic world, underground or beyond last weekend’s Norwegian Whovian portal?
“One might dream of random things, and find some undercurrent of truth; a strain of allegory in an otherwise ceaseless cacophony of mental anguish.”
“I know in this moment that there is little chance of life for me beyond this precipice.”
“My worry is not of life after death. I have come to a silent worship of an undying light; an everlasting current of energy connecting all life.”
Such energy as the gestalt from literature that I still seek by testing all patterns?
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Of Marble and Mud by Farah Rose Smith
“A great curtain from the sky will fall down, draping over the memory of the black tree.”
One of those curtains again… maybe in the same role as went before in this book? This is a highly intangible dreamscape of two sisters, where one, I believe, harms the other and then regrets it, in a world of Gothic surrealism that reminds me of the days of the ancient poetic Gothic mag I used to inhabit with my countless prose poems and vignettes. Subsuming nights with bones and flesh of the dead. And that gave me a sense of nostalgia. And I knew I understood this work but understood it somewhere away from the place in my mind or brain with which I usually have such understanding. That may turn out to be good or bad but, either way, you can’t have one without the other, Helen and Vanessa, Marble and Mud, understanding and not understanding…
“I forget the meaning of all things and bask in the eternity of not knowing.”
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AS WITH ALEM by Farah Rose Smith
“What is a worm but a nightmare of passion in small form?”
A painted portrait via mirror shards makes the eponymous Alem the male with whom Marid, married life performs all forms of regret, passion and dream, where the replicable ‘me’, the woman narrator, is created, destroyed, recreated, finally transcended as apparition or something more? Intensely poetic, often clotted, begging to be read again. Replicated. In case I got it wrong. Or it got me wrong.
Twice told, more than twice read.
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IN THE WAY OF ESLAN MENDEGHAST by Farah Rose Smith
The artwork looks like me bemused, along with a new photo of a black hole as an eye, showing me with my inability to grasp this text, another rare defeat in my life of real-time reviewing. It was as if I understood all the words without understanding anything they said when strung together. I think I understood ‘your’ (the author’s) creation by this fiction of your own victimiser and stalker ranting at you with your own dreams and nightmares. And ‘mendeghast’ as someone’s crucial password to open all their important sites. A sort of excerpt from a novel and characters’ names with which I should already be familiar. And monsters and visions that should already be tested by my own dreams. Clutching at such critical straws, though, I have been given word-sickness by this text. As a septuagenarian, I surely must need to experience my own encroaching senile dementia before this dementia fully takes me over by erasing itself from my knowledge of it as dementia. Too late, perhaps, as I can now judge by reading what I have just written above. Yes, too late.
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The other stories in the book are entitled:
The Wytch-Byrd of The Nabryd-Keind
The Visitor
The Land of Other
As Unbreakable as The World
An Account Above Burnside Park
Sorcerer Machine
Dark Ocean
Ash in the Pocket
folie à plusiers
Rithenslofer (The Corpses of Mer)
Of One Pure Will
Time Disease (In The Waking City)
Ivisou
The River