Milking the Beast Within, By Ben Douglass

 

Milking the Beast Within, Selected Poems By Ben Douglass. Atomic Mountain Press, LLC, Edited by Rowena White. 63 pages, 2021. Cover by Albert Birkle.

Milking the Beast Within contains thirty-seven poems spanning from 1971 to 2012. This is apparently only a small subset of the poems written by Douglass, who is a poet I’ve not previously read. While each poem seems intensely personal, all are also universal in theme, with the author addressing primarily the issues of relationships and love. The poems are free verse and written in everyday language. As a result, they come off as exceedingly honest.

I’m not widely read in poetry and have mostly read speculative poetry, which normally has SF, Fantasy, or horror elements. I did immediately recognize a certain kinship between Douglass’s work and that of Charles Bukowski. The plain language is similar, as are many of the themes. It was no surprise then to find that one poem in the collection is called, “On Reading Bukowski for the First Time.” However, the collection contains a number of poems written before Douglass discovered Bukowski and the same kind of language and content is found there as well. So, it seems less of a direct influence by Bukowski and more of a certain, common viewpoint on life. Still, I believe I found more hopefulness and peacefulness in Douglass’s work than I have previously in Bukowski.

The cover, called “The Acrobat,” was…intriguing. It’s quite an ugly image of a man, almost a caricature, but it does catch the viewer’s attention. I was surprised to find that it had been done in 1921. It certainly seemed contemporary to me on first look.

All in all, this is a very nice package and the poems are insightful and make one think. I enjoyed them and will likely reread them over time, as well as seeking out more of Douglass’s work.  

Spacers Snarled in the hair of Comets

SPACERS SNARLED IN THE HAIR OF COMETS: By Bruce Boston. Mind’s Eye Publications, 2022, 39 pages. (Introduction by Andrew Darlington).

This latest collection from Bruce Boston contains twenty-two poems, all of which—I believe—have been previously published separately in magazines. Who is Bruce Boston, you ask? Well, he’s my favorite living poet, but perhaps that doesn’t mean much to you. He is also a Bram Stoker Award Winner, a multiple-time Rhysling Award Winner (the highest award given for speculative poetry in the US), and a helluva nice guy. But maybe none of those things mean anything to you.

But do you love language? Specifically, the English language? Do you enjoy science fiction?  If you do, then you owe it to yourself to sample Bruce Boston’s work, and this book is a good place to start. Let me give you a little taste:

Burning green to metagreen,

a rush of colors in between.

Mandalic moons, sidereal seas.

A spacer’s life is ice and fire,

graced by iridescent dreams.

Besides the beauty of the language, Boston’s poems also tell stories. In fact, he’s basically a storyteller and has also written many poetic short stories, as well as a wonderfully complex dystopian novel called The Guardener's Tale. It’s both the language and the storytelling aspects that draw me to Boston’s work. As a writer myself, I find inspiration in his language and the germs of many ideas in his stories and imagery. I jotted down half a dozen ideas for tales just from this collection. I recommend him for writers and readers alike.  

You can find out more about the book at Mind’s Eye Publications here: 

Or you can order the book from Amazon here:

Or from Lulu here: 

For more information about Bruce Boston and his work, you can also check out his website. 

Spirit Vessels: By Dennis Formento

Spirit Vessels: By Dennis Formento: Foothills Publishing, 2018, 78 pages. ISBN: 978-0-921053-27-9.

Spirit Vessels is the first chapbook that I’ve read from Dennis Formento, who lives in Slidell, Louisiana and is active in the local poetry community here. I’ve not met him personally but was interested in reading some of his work since I’ve heard good things about it from other local poets.

Spirit Vessels is Formento’s most recent collection and is a substantial work. The poems are free form and often leap from image to image. Some words that occurred to me frequently as I read through the pieces here were “jazz” and “improvisation.” A few pieces struck me as having surrealistic elements, but many more are what I would call “nature” poems. Local Louisiana elements are common but expand far beyond the usual swamps and gators. And there are plenty of references to natural environments outside of Louisiana. Most of this “nature” material is not pretty nature but reflects the damage done by pollution, coastal erosion, and climate change. These are not, for the most part, happy poems, but they present a realistic, if dramatic, view of the changing world environment.

I don’t want to suggest that such nature poems make up the entirety of the collection. There is plenty of variety here. But it was these pieces, such as “Water,” “Poem: ‘Useless’” and “Bayou Paddle,” that were the most memorable and effective to me. If you'd like to purchase a copy of the book, the publisher's site is here: 

There are at least two more collections by Formento that I know of, Looking For An Out Place, and Cineplex. I’ve got copies of both of these and since I certainly enjoyed Spirit Vessels very much I’ll be looking forward to reading and reviewing these as well.

Sirens Call

The Sirens Call, Issue 35, is out just in time for Halloween. This is a dark fiction, dark poetry ezine that has really good production values and a plethora of creepy/scary stories and poems. It's 144 pages of material, and is free to download. I have three poems in it, "In Wormwood Days of Wither," "Mother Cold-Eyes," and "A Hiss of Angels."

Why not check it out? It costs you nothing. And if you like it there is a place for comments at the publication site, which is here. You just have to click on the magazine cover at the site (not the one below) to download your free PDF.

National Poetry Day

Today, September 28, is National Poetry Day. I urge you to read a little poetry, perhaps pick up a collection or two. I believed that I hated poetry when I was in Junior High and High School, but that was because I seldom found any that really engaged my imagination. These days I spend a little time every week reading poetry. I find it enhances my life.

Most of what I read would be called "speculative poetry," which generally means that it involves concepts and ideas from literary fields such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. However, my personal favorite poet is Dylan Thomas, who I've mentioned on this blog many times before. While not specifically "speculative," Thomas's poetry has a certain surreal element to it that I find very lovely and thought provoking.

If you'd like to know what I recommend in the field of poetry, here is a link to my poetry shelf on Goodreads. You can see what I've read and how I rated it.

Although I don't consider myself much of a poet, I do try my hand at the form on occasion. Here's one of mine, the only one I've ever written about my writing "muse." It was originally published in The Pedestal Magazine.

GAUNT

As autumn shadows
evolve into winter nights,
hunger comes sniffing.

Gaunt, the gray wolf has grown.

With yellow eyes.
Her belly snarls a wild music of want,
to match the growl in her throat.

In the spring she fed well

from the hunt.
Her teeth left the green grass
dappled with red.

But summer came warm

and did not warm her.
Heat drove the hunted to ground.
Sickness claimed her pack.

On a hushed and lorn eve,

in a desperate famine,
through cold black woods
she came weak to my fire.

I threw her the carcass

of my feast,
and she became my muse.
In no way domesticated.

With strength returned, she hunted.

Spurning the tame food I offered,
she left me the feathers
of some gutted prey.

Now on occasion she visits.

At edge of fire and shadow,
only her eyes glow.
We judge each other warily.

We will be friends,

a pack of two.
Or one will kill the other.

Robert Frost's Poems

New Enlarged Pocket Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems: With an Introduction and Commentary by Louis Untermeyer.  Pocket Books: 1971 (29^th printing):

My first introduction to Robert Frost came in high school, specifically “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” These are his two most famous poems and probably most people have some familiarity with them. I like them and both spoke to me.  I wouldn’t say they inspired me or influenced my own poetry, which developed much later. In high school I was still convinced that I didn’t like poetry. I came to understand later that I didn’t like poetry with facile rhymes or that simply pointed out an observation, thought or feeling that I already knew well from my own experience. It wasn’t until I discovered Dylan Thomas in college that I began to see the possibility for poetry to transcend and expand personal experiences.

Because Frost’s poetry spoke of what I would describe as mundane reality, I just never pursued his work further. I don’t mean mundane in a negative sense here. I mean it essentially as “objective” reality. But that’s not what I want to experience in the literary works that I read. I live mundane reality. I want the poetry I read to twist that reality and surprise me. Knowing of Frost’s influence on the field of poetry, however, I did pick up this collection of his poems. I decided I needed to read them. Here are my thoughts.

First, I can certainly agree with the critics that Frost was a superbly talented poet and a keen observer of the world. His poems are typically quite simple in construction, with straightforward rhyming patterns. When they impact me, they tend to evoke quiet and contemplative moods. And now I’ll say, and hope that I won’t be misunderstood, that quiet and contemplative is not what I want from my poetry. I want disturbing. I want rawness. I want the surreal. Frost does not give me these experiences and for that reason he’ll never be as important to me as someone like Dylan Thomas.

I really hope people do not take this as some kind of “dislike” of Frost, or that I’m saying he’s not a poet worthy of study and consideration. I don’t mean it that way. I’m talking about my own very personal and visceral (or lack of that) reaction to his work. Perhaps the best way I can say it is this: I have a bookshelf where I keep copies of works that inspire my own writing, or that have in some way shaped my philosophy on life. Dylan Thomas’s poetry is on that shelf. Some of Ray Bradbury’s is on that shelf. Robert Frost will not be on that shelf, though he may well be on “your” inspirational shelf.  And if that is the case then I salute you.

Moving from my general response to Frost’s work to this specific collection, I’m not sure I’d recommend it. The poems are well presented, of course, and I generally liked the overall organization of the book. However, I just did not care for, or find useful, the commentary by Louis Untermeyer. Untermeyer was a well respected poet and critic, but I found his comments about Frost’s poetry to be long on hyperbole and low on information. Here’s an example, from page 168.

“The poems of Robert Frost have a way of uniting opposites. They are casual in tone but profound in effect, teasing and intense, playful yet deeply penetrating.  Even when they seem to be about a particular place, they suggest ideas unlimited by space.”

This is a good example, to me, of saying nothing while seeming to say much. I would much rather have had information about when and where the poetry was written, and information about any historical connections that the poem may have had. I bought this collection, in part, because I felt I needed some commentary to help me experience Frost. I think now that this was a mistake and I should have come to the poems without any filter. To those of you who are interested in writing poetry and want to study Frost for that reason, I’d suggest a collection with no commentary. For those of you who are making a more literary study of Frost, this collection might be useful but I don’t think it would be a good starting point. Something that places Frost’s work better into the context of his times would likely prove more useful.

Picking up on the Blog Again

Since my summer has begun, I'm hoping to pick up a bit on this blog, which I've neglected for quite a while. As per my usual, it'll mostly have to do with writing and reading, with occasional asides into whatever strikes my fancy.

On the writing front, I have a western novella about 3/4s done called "The Scarred One." Had to put it on hold during the school year, but now I'll try to get untracked on it. I've got quite a few completed stories that I need to submit, including two about the sword & sorcery character of Krieg. And I'm still considering self publishing a set of horror stories based on my dreams. I have about a dozen of those finished.

I'm working on a vampire story right now that I'm enjoying, and have opening scenes on several other tales that I don't know what to do with. Lately I've been working on a lot of poetry, partially because it takes less time and I can squeeze out a few moments from work here and there to commit poem-icide. Several of my poems appear in the latest issue of The Horror Zine. Thanks to Jeani Rector.

So, it is with good intentions that I post this blog. Let's see if that holds up through the next few weeks!

Rise of the Rain Forest: A Book Review

Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest: By Robert Frazier and Bruce Boston: Crystal Lake Publishing, 2017, 245 pages.

In an undefined future, the rain forest has taken on a grotesquely beautiful life. It and everything in it mutates wildly, incessantly. The only laws governing the changes appear to be chaos and rage. Some humans survive at the jungle’s ever hungry and expanding frontier; their existence is precarious. The people who live within the forest itself are no longer human.  Perhaps they are more, perhaps less. The cities fight back with flame and chemical warfare. The forest attacks with spores and vines and strange beasts. In the end, everything succumbs.

In this thick and meaty work, the reader will find poems, flash fiction, and even a few longer stories. Many of these have appeared in other publications but there are also a number of new pieces. Boston and Frazier appear to have been writing of the mutant rain forest for quite a few years, and I’m glad to see this material collected together in one place by Crystal Lake Publishing. It certainly heightens and reinforces the impact of the individual pieces.

I’m very familiar with Bruce Boston’s work, less so with that of Robert Frazier. However, I thought the vision of these two writers meshed wonderfully throughout the collection.  As I started reading, I was paying attention to which particular author did what. I soon stopped concerning myself with that as I got further immersed in the world. It didn’t matter any longer.

The greatest strengths here are word play, imagery, and resonance. Maybe word ‘play’ isn’t quite the right term, for the language is serious. Word “work” might be better. Others have remarked on the imagery as apocalyptic and hallucinatory. I concur. But there’s a bit more. The imagery is itself insidious—not in a negative sense but in the sense of entrapping and beguiling. It’s almost as if the spores of the mutant rain forest wash over you with every page you turn. You wonder if they might take root on your skin. What might be born from such a symbiosis? And there you have the resonance.

A Poem in Progress

In a story recently I used the phrase "black shine," and most members of my writing group didn't like it because they had no idea what it meant or how to visualize it. But for me, the phrase is evocative and sensuous. It creates plenty of clear images for me. Anyway, I decided to try to capture the meaning of it for me in a poem, and below is a piece of that. It's not done yet. Who knows when it will be.

Black Shine

In the black shine

she waited with Wendigo eyes

and a pillow smile.

Wind had curled her hair,

had rouged her cheeks.

Gin had painted her lips.

The fingernails that scraped

her silks

spelled my name in Braille.

Black shine, dark soul

I am lost

Reviews: Torn and Frayed, and, HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. II

Here's a couple of reviews I put up on Goodreads lately. I also posted these on Amazon but they took off the HWA one, probably because I have a poem in that collection. Because of that, I thought I'd go ahead and run it here, in addition to my review of David Cranmer's latest: Torn and Frayed.

Torn and Frayed, by David Cranmer . Drifter Detective Series, Number 7. Beat to a Pulp Publishers.

Torn and Frayed is the seventh offering in Beat to a Pulp’s Drifter Detective series. It’s a novella length piece. This is the first in the series written by Cranmer. Previous installments have been written by Garnett Elliott: 1. The Drifter Detective, 2. Hell Up in Houston, 3. The Girls of Bunker Pines, by Wayne D. Dundee, 4. Wide Spot in the Road, Elliott again 5. Dinero Del Mar, and by Alec Cizak, 6. Between Juarez and El Paso.

The main character in this series is Jack Laramie, who is the grandson of Legendary US marshal Cash Laramie, created by Edward Grainger. Jack Laramie is a WWII vet who roams post WWII Texas in a rickety DeSoto with a horse trailer hitched on the back. He is an occasional PI. Jack Laramie has many of the characteristics of his grandfather,  although perhaps a bit less of a total bad ass. He takes on a case, gets into a mess, and somehow extricates himself, although it is seldom pretty. Along the way, he gets beat on and does some beating back, and the series seldom ends with a clear cut: “good guys win” scenario.

Torn and Frayed follows this general pattern. Jack decides to take a break from the road and PI work and takes a job as a ranch hand. Turns out the rancher has a past that is coming back to haunt him, most specifically in the form of a daughter who is not what her father thinks she is. A lot of unpleasant history gets revealed along the way.

Like most in the Drifter Detective series, Torn and Frayed does not tie the story up in a nice pretty package at the end. There’s messiness and ugliness and it’s hard to say that anyone really wins. They survive, at a cost. But this series has real sense of realism running through it and Torn and Frayed fits well into this pattern. I much enjoyed it. There is, in addition, a bonus story at the end, “Missing,” which features Cash Laramie himself.

HWA Poetry Showcase, Volume II, Edited by Peter Adam Salomon, Published by Horror Writers Association.

This is a wonderful collection of dark poetry. It also contains tributes to two respected members of HWA who have passed away recently. The work begins with a tribute to Rocky Wood, long-term president of HWA. I didn't know him but have heard many great things about him. The work ends with a tribute to Tom Piccirilli, and with one of Tom's fine poems, "Protected," which was the last poem he completed before his death. I knew and respected Tom through his work.

The poems here are meaty and all of high quality, ranging from the creepy, to the gory, to the thoughtful, to the humorous. There are too many really good ones to mention individually. Some really nice efforts from the likes of Bruce Boston, Marge Simon, Kathryn Ptacek, and Corrine De Winter. Some others that particularly moved me were: The Cry of Autumn Stars by Mark Fuller Dillon, Fiend by Annie Neugebauer, Into Old Mill Creek by Ian A. Patton, The Tune by Lance Davis, Midnight at the Hub City Cafe by Lynette Mejia, and The Man Who Disappears by Robert Perez. I also have a poem in this collection, called R.O.A.D, which stands for The River of Angel’s Dreaming. I was very happy to be included in this collection.

In Their Glory

Fiddling around with a poem today. Not quite sure where it might be going. Here's what I've got so far.

I see the wolves of winter

in their glory,

wearing coats of blood.

As black eyes flame to blue,

they bare the teeth that

bring justice to the night.

I see the feral horses of hell.

I hear the saber rattle

of iron hooves on stone.

Their eyes roil with desire

to sow their foes destruction

and reap them of life.

Pedestal Magazine

Pedestal Magazine #76 is up, and I’m very honored to have a poem in the magazine. My piece is called “Gaunt,” a poem I wrote a couple of years back about how I see my literary muse. As I’ve been reading through the other wonderful works in this issue, I feel very lucky to have had a piece chosen for this company. I’m really blown away by the depth of language and emotion shown. You can check out the issue here.

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Resonance Dark & Light

 Resonance Dark & Light, by Bruce Boston. From Eldritch Press, 2015.  89 pages.

Should we call Bruce Boston the hardest working man in speculative poetry? I don’t know anyone else who has a better claim over a career, and certainly no one who has demonstrated the kind of consistent brilliance that Boston has. His poems are widely published for a very good reason; they resonate with readers. Boston’s latest collection, currently available for preorder at Eldritch Press, even has “resonance” in its title, and ends with a masterful piece entitled “Resonance Redux.”

Resonance Dark & Light contains fifty-two poems. Many of these have been published in poetry magazines around the world, although several are new. Several are also award winning pieces, such as “The Music of the Stars,” which won the 2013 Balticon Poetry Award. Such is the quality of all these pieces, however, that the award winners don’t generally call any special attention to themselves among the other fine works. An exception to this, for me, is “Surreal Shopping List,” which won the SFPA’s 2014 Dwarf Form (under 11 lines) Category. I don’t know that this is my favorite Bruce Boston poem ever, but it’s my favorite right now. It seems so deceptively simple as well, and yet I’ve been trying—without succeeding—for a month now to produce even a semblance of its “coolness.” 

I don’t know that it was Boston’s intent, but I felt like the first poems in this collection were more light-hearted than much of the previous stuff I’ve read from him. The pieces then turned darker, and darker, before lightening up again toward the end. It felt much like the passing of day into night and back to day, or perhaps like the progression of the seasons. The title itself suggests such a passage.

All I really know is that Resonance Dark & Light, tickled me, chilled me, and set me to thinking.  Ranging from the Bradburyesque imagery of “The Music of Skeletons,” and “Chrononaut Inductees,” to the science fiction terrors of “Tasty Horrors,” to the sheer fun of “Not Only Thoats,” to the impossible to categorize pieces like “Surreal Shopping List,” this collection is hard to pigeonhole but impossible not to enjoy.  For more information about Bruce Boston and his work, you can also check out his website. 

And just remember, “not only thoats need the warm dark.”

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Two Poems

I wrote the following poem a few weeks ago now, but lest anyone be concerned, it does not reflect my current feelings. It was me on my commute harking back to a much earlier time in my life. I imagine most people go through phases like this. They just don’t write about them.

THE EMPTY

I see a pinprick of sun,

red on clouds to the east.

All else is gray.

Sky.

Water.

Road.

My empty heart.

I am a wave passing through.

Leaving a moment’s ripple,

that soon dies away.

No trail behind me where I went.

No path ahead where I go.

The world is a hollow place

and I have left no mark.

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Even when I’m feeling good I don’t tend to write upbeat poetry. I guess I’m just a moody SOB. But in an effort to be more positive, I have constructed the following ditty. I do hope you enjoy.

THE LITTLE BIRD

Saw a little bird hop hopping all around

Eating the seed I’d spread on the ground

He hopped to the left and hopped to the right

He hopped all day; it was quite a sight

You could see his hopping was all for fun

As he bopped around in the glorious sun

The day passed sweetly and evening fell

Then came cat, without his bell

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Drear Sky

Drear sky. Wet Earth.

A cold drizzle falls like nails.

The daylight is grey;

The green of the grass is heavy and dull.

Yet there is mystery here.

Goldfinches and chickadees flit in their hundreds

in and out of our bird feeders.

Doves bob for seeds

around the last shards of an old stump.

Cardinals and Blue Jays splash color

through the dark boles of oaks, pines, magnolia.

There is mystery everywhere here.

Leaves rattle downward through air,

stirred by a wind flying over

the quiet cup of our backyard.

Squirrels send up sentinel calls.

They sound like gossip to me.

They sound like mystery.

Dimly I become aware of another sound,

a susurration that is like breathing.

I think it a medley of moving wings,

crackling seeds, scraping claws, clicking beaks,

all set against a backdrop of water

sighing down trees.

The mystery taunts me.

There is meaning in all this.

Though I cannot fathom it.

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NOTES TO A HUSBAND

I first met J. Bruce Fuller at a science fiction convention many years ago. He was much younger than I, and I remember him having a lot more hair than now. We talked quite a while after one of my panels and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. In fact, we’ve worked together several times on various poetry projects, including my collection of vampire haiku called Wanting the Mouth of a Lover. I’ve been very happy to see him gaining a reputation as a prominent Louisiana and southern poet. From my reading of his work, it’s well deserved. Below, I review his latest chapbook offering.

  

J. Bruce Fuller. Notes To A Husband.  Imaginary Friend Press. 2013. 18 pp. Introduction by Amy Fluery. Edited by Dan Nowak.

J. Bruce Fuller is a Louisiana native who obtained his MFA in poetry from McNeese State University and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana—Lafayette. He has already been widely published and his latest poetry chapbook, Notes To A Husband, is the subject of this review.

In Fuller’s latest chapbook, he uses the form of notes from a wife to a husband to illustrate the waning of a relationship. There is no heightened poetical language to mask or mythologize the relationship. It is laid out stark on the page, in the common language of humanity. All the ambivalence of such dramas is there. Even while the woman thinks “about old lovers” she washes her husband’s “favorite mug.” She admits her own faults; she sugarcoats nothing.

It’s often claimed that what is left unsaid is at least as important as what is actually said. Notes To A Husband illustrates this perfectly. I’ve seldom been made so keenly aware of what can be revealed “between the lines.”  In her introduction to Fuller’s collection, Amy Fluery refers to the “indirection of silence,” and I think that’s a very fine way of describing the depth to be found in these mostly brief poems. They’re like the proverbial house that is much bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. They expand in your consciousness as you read them.

I highly recommend Notes To A Husband.  You can find out more about the collection, or order a copy for yourself, at Imaginary Friend Press: www.imaginaryfriendpress.com

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SCORN #4

I didn't intend for it to be a whole week between "Scorn Posts" but school is in session and I have been swamped with work. I'm also trying to jump start an older nonfiction project that I have and that has taken a lot of what little spare time I've had. Anyway, here's the next entry in my Scorn series below.

4. From inches away we lock gazes. The mirror and I. The glass fogs with our breaths but at least that means we are alive. Then one of us begins to scribe letters in the mist. I do not know which of us it is. I read an R E S O L… I hope for a moment that the scribe has simply left off the “V E.” But perhaps I am reading the word backward. 

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SCORN #3

She is gowned in razors, and the blood on her hands is not her own. I have no weapons to match hers. So I study her cautiously, from far away. I conceal my scent with wormwood. I bind my belongings to my flesh so that no stray sound alerts her to my presence. It would not do to let the predator know that you are stalking it. Such a revelation would be prelude to a fatal nocturne.

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SCORN #2

I dream of a billion years from now, when the earth is more bone than dirt, when the weight of the myriad dead have slowed the world’s orbit to a standstill. Half the planet lies nighted and frozen. Half burns. I wander this wasteland, clothed only in ashes. The cold I hate. I cannot abide there; it is too much like people I have known.

It is not pleasant, either, to see the sun hanging crimson and hungry over the day lit half of this place. That orb is swollen with its own rot and licks its lips in anticipation of the feast to come when the earth spirals into its mouth. But at least then I will be able to rest. Only another billion years to wait. 

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Bruce Boston's Dark Roads

Bruce Boston. Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems, 1971-2012.  Colusa, CA: Dark Renaissance Books. 2013.156 pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-937128-90-6. Illustrated by M. Wayne Miller.

Bruce Boston has been writing for many years but I only discovered him about fifteen years ago when I joined the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I was immediately struck by Boston’s ability to evoke images I’d never experience before, and by his immense vocabulary and a talent for wielding words with the delicacy of an épée. Since that time I’ve eagerly awaited every new poem he’s released. I’d have no idea of the count of individual poems that Boston has published, but there are more than forty collections of his work. He has certainly been productive.

Recently, Dark Renaissance Books released a selected collection of  many of Boston’s best “long” poems published between 1971 and 2012. I’m not sure exactly how they define long poems but all the ones here are at least two pages of material. Most are quite a bit more. Some are certainly epic in length as well as scope.

As a result of this being a “selected” collection, I’ve previously read many of these poems. I believe this actually increased my enjoyment of them. Boston’s poetry is so rich that I’ve often found myself rereading his work anyway. The first time through I’m swept up by the imagery, which is always perfect but seldom what you expect, and by the joy of the word play. The second time I read for meaning, and though I’m not always able to extract a coherent meaning, I’m always left with a sense of ‘resonance,’ a sense that truth lies within if I but had the breadth of experience to grasp it.

It’s hard to pick favorites from such a collection, where every page holds gems, but I have to call out two particular poems, the multiple award winning “Pavane for a Cyber-Princess,” and “She Was There for Him the Last Time.” Here’s a fragment from “Last Time.”

she was there for him the last time

in the bombed-out city

where the decimating trajectories

left their scars upon the earth

like sabers crossed and waiting

I highly recommend any and all of Boston’s work. You can pick Dark Roads up from the publisher: http://www.darkregions.com/books/dark-roads-by-bruce-boston

You should certainly check out Boston’s website, where you can access some of his work online:  

www.bruceboston.com

I’ll end with a quote from another poem in Dark Roads, “In the Short Seasons of a Long Year without You.”

This sheet of broken lines

I leave for you to find.

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