Monday, November 1, 2010
New Book: Rummaging In the Attic
Monday, July 13, 2009
David McLean Reviews: "Paper Cuts"
Paper Cuts
Constance Stadler
Calliope Nerve Press
As always, in this collection Constance Stadler achieves a balance between modern content and a sampled traditional form, whereby the poetry runs through the lexis of the traditional but with neologisms and archaisms rubbing shoulders and thighs in a glorious mêlée that achieves often the status of poetry of the purest water.
Her targets are everything from Plato (completely unjustly, the poem could be about somebody else) to Jesus and the Society of same, completely spot on target. Modern life is dissected and diagnosed here, found lacking, the anxious and painful half-lives people live are examined and found wanting, the poet's own pain is examined and there is a clear movement in the course of the book towards a tone of understanding and acceptance, the attainment of beauty in some sense is seen as a justification of the anhedonia.
The book takes us from hospital to
Everything falls under the poet's lens – passion:
My engorged vulva
Screams for jungle abductions
And whatever would take me
Could not plunge deep enough.
Tomorrow,
Brings shower and the routines
Of numbness.
That is, if I
Conquer this animal
Night.
(Seething ...)
mortality:
Sepia catacombed
In sweet stench of young rot
The maggot is well fed.
Bloating, we are new made
In concatenated leprosies
In our mouldy hypocrisies
In the death bed lie.
(concessional)
the reticence of nature:
Grass tuft, will you not speak to me?
A blue and brown tit jumped on my table
Near the
My sandwich
As a full bosomed poppy floated by.
Wilted corn stalks in vermilion light
Thrill as magic
Snowy egrets dance in pond surrender
To cabbage palms.
(Terrestrial Illuminations)
This book makes love and passion in the face of sickness, dis-ease, bereavement and a more general ontic and ontological abandonment. It makes the word a lover and an expression of the body's engorgement, it makes the muse a bedfellow, and the reader a voyeur, which is what readers usually are, but not so openly expressed.
Only Constance Stadler writes like this nowadays, only she can. Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/paper-cuts/7388443
David McLean
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Chap Reviews
Tinted Steam
by Constance Stadler
Shadow Archer Press
This chapbook marks the return of Constance Stadler to the poetry world after a lengthy absence in academia. It makes a very impressive and linguistically phenomenally gifted return to the poetry world.
In the laughing house
strewn in the plum dappled
peach tricking meadow,
from “Welsh-flecked Romance” which is a perfect poem that shows a Dylan Thomas style facility for adjectival use, and a true feeling for the beauty and placeability, the portability, of words that is the mark of an authentic poet.
“Isfahan” shows a knowledge of and sensitivity to Muslim history and culture that is unusual in a country which has a very dismal recent history of oppressing Islam. It lingers around the precincts of the name, “Isfahan” is one of many possible transliterations. It even quotes young Coleridge.
The atmosphere is captured in lines like
A solitary oud plucked by
still warm
ornamented fingers
still warm
sings a sad
uncertain song
to the scarlet dying sun.
(The Last Arabian Night)
The atmosphere in this and some other poems is Oriental, but not one of Orientalism, the poem tastes genuine, the attributes are not just dragged in for effect.
Other poems are genuine and immediate in their emotional impact
I cannot reach up your legs
and pull out the death in you
and I cannot
hug it away.
(Impotence)
There is a whole deal of linguistic precision here, very fetching lines like
I believe in the sky
Elongated rectangles
In mottled, motley hues.
And trapezoids of geese
Protracting necks to
Cry their course
Of Pythagorean perfection.
(World Geometry)
On the whole this chapbook represents a stunning run that takes us from Romanticism and the East to modernism and the postmodernism that (if we are to believe Lyotard) both precedes and succeeds modernism). Since Connie is now definitively back, i hope this is the race, because if it's just warming up then we're all totally outclassed when she starts running for real.
pushing lemmings
David McLean
Erbacce Press
The title of David McLean’s new book, pushing lemmings would either seem to be effort wasted or on the cusp of cruelty. But the latter is where McLean’s poetic soul resides; on the barbarity inflicted by daily life, which naturally leads to an equally unremitting examination of its counterpart. McLean rages but with a singular, penetrative, deeply affected full out stare of ritual, nocturnal, and diurnal horrors. One can see this easily in a poem like summer sun:
summer sun children swim in the sea
they imagine they are happy
they imagine this is life
night in me sings a swimming winter shark to them
rises and strikes
What is so clear is that this is an insightful affected man who is lashing out at the certain abduction of innocence.
Often called a “gritty poet of the macabre”, McLean shows most eloquent sensitivities, philosophic knowledge as well as an array of rare poetic gifts. The lyrical, insightful question posed in culture shows all of this:
we are our antiphysis all of us,
like something out of Huysmans
with our being a denial of what
we are not -the animal - is passing
worth noting, the nothing
we are?
Or as in maybe, creation:
but the questions of why have no home
in science, which is poncy ontology
not manly metaphysics that rips gibberish like hair waxed from time’s
private tits
Any simplistic categorization of McLean’s work reveals a lack of immersion and engagement which is required by the reader, but the rewards are great. McLean in all of his passions has a biting wit, as in details about heaven
they often give details about heaven
without admitting to guessing, pretending
that it sounds rather nice, which it doesn’t
unless you actually like a boring life
Yes, this is a poet who has stared Life and Death in the face and all of its aspects. He questions, and challenges and howls, for anyone who has the courage to hear. In my blessed devils he tells us much, particularly why any sentient lover of poetry and, thus, one imbued in the questions that haunt us all ~ many to silence ~ must read this work of rarefied art. They will be changed.
I hope the blessed devils
And accursed bacteria
That live in me scratch ruins
On my hollow sounding bones
That the replete ghouls may read
A lesson of profoundest negativity
When they plow through the meat
Machine me and see nothing
Onside any of us, just death
And insanity dressed in night.
New Chaps
Monday, January 5, 2009
‘Romance’
In the laughing house
strewn in the plum dappled
peach tricking meadow,
A thicket of blackberried
hummingbirds steal my form.
That I may gaze through the
fawn breast light
at the glimmers of hyacinth hair
and the ripple of your farm hued
body sawing and bailing, in
briny brilliantine hallow.
Till ash evening
falls and I return to the
dragonfly blight in
the onyx ribboned hills
that fill me with the
quarry of your absence
tracing unkissed lips, pale
in the time skewered dusk.
