Aging Vessel
My brittle skeleton
is trapped in the prison
of my festering flesh
and keeps my soul an inmate,
clinging to my splintering bones
Philosophic Ramblings
In the coincidence of life
we postpone death daily,
yet rarely seek higher purpose.
Now that we have been mastered
by the seductive video screen
we are victims of electronics.
Evil conspires with gravity
and pulls us down, down,
as we substitute spectation
for entangling alliances.
The grievances that rasp our hearts
devour the pleasure of our days
and stir seething cauldrons of hate
that will spill on our tomorrows.
Man is the cruelest animal
exceeding any creature of nature
in torture, mayhem and destruction.
We are raised in the garden of greed
and become trapped in the ghetto of need.
The unkind earth eats us all.
Death smiles when chill creeps in our bones.
Humanity, our dysfunctional family.
• Gary Beck's poetry and fiction has appeared in numerous publications. His chapbook The Conquest of Somalia will be published by Cervena Barva Press. His plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes, and Sophocles have been produced Off-Broadway.
|
||||
|
Recent Comments
Recent Articles
Search
RSS Newsfeeds
Main Page RSS
Login
Month Archive
Links
Make a donation by PayPal
Amazon Ads
 |
Thursday, September 13
Civilised ways - two poems by Gary Beck
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 13 Sep 2007 07:48 AM BST
Tuesday, September 11
The Book of Blood – reviewed by Dot Cobley
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 11 Sep 2007 05:58 PM BST
The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver
Cape (2006) 66pp, £9.00 ISBN: 0224076841 It has taken twelve years for Vicki Feaver’s third collection, The Book of Blood, to appear. The ‘Blood’ of the title includes the blood of murder, sacrifice, menstruation, ancestry, and of wild creatures shot for food. As in her previous book, The Handless Maiden, she draws on classical mythology and fairytales, paintings, female sexuality, sex and death, but there are new themes here too: love poems, and others dealing with mental illness. This is a wise, wide-ranging, excitingly uneven book, with occasional disappointments, such as ‘Borrowed Dog’ and ‘Spider’. Women who turn to murder are a recurring theme in both collections. In The Handless Maiden Judith, grieving for her murdered husband, ‘rolled in the ash of the fire/ just to be touched and dirtied/ by something’ (‘Judith’). This idea is picked up in ‘Cinderella’. Feaver’s Cinderella rolls in the ashes then: I print the shapes of grief hands feet breasts belly open mouth onto fine linen sheets. This impassioned defiance finds a chillier echo in ‘Blodeuwedd’, a poem based on an ancient Welsh tale, blodeuwedd being the Welsh word for owl (literally, ‘flower face’). The narrator, a woman fashioned out of flowers, tells how she conspired with her lover to murder her husband, then was turned into an owl as punishment: Sometimes, I lunge at your lighted windows: printing the glass with breast, talons, outstretched wings, flower face of a desperate girl. ‘Blodeuwedd’ is only one of many poems where people turn into birds or animals, and vice versa. ‘Bufo Bufo’, where the fable of the frog prince is turned on its head, starts as a seemingly straightforward description of a toad in the narrator’s cellar, then we are told that it’s spring, the toad’s mating season: ‘But he’s my prisoner – soft, warty stone// who at night swells/ to the size of a man.’ ‘Glow-Worm’ is the first of a dozen love poems at the heart of the book (in both senses). This is a deftly controlled piece, full of assonance and half-rhymes – shine/immune, lawn/palm, butt/cigarette – with rhythms that start to run forward, then are pulled gently back. The charged restraint of the writing, the hints of budding intimacy, and the symbolism of the title all combine to make this probably the sexiest poem in the book. This is Feaver at her best: well worth the wait. • Reviewed by Dot Cobley. In a fortchcoming anthology Dot Cobley says of herself “I’ve got six different jobs, I attend four assorted poetry groups, and do most of my writing between 5:00 and 6:30am.” Monday, September 10
Jazz and tattoos - two poems by Colin Cross
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 10 Sep 2007 03:14 PM BST
JAZZ MUSICIAN
a jazz musician is someone who takes a familiar tune and using all his skill and talent makes it as unfamiliar as possible BRANDED I have noticed of late how many women have tattoos on the small of their backs as though they've been branded like cattle • These are the second batch of poems we've published by Norwich-based Colin Cross. Thursday, September 6
CROW by Gwilym Williams
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 06 Sep 2007 05:06 PM BST
CROW
CROW flew just once in a straight line the hooded one living in my garden straight as a shoulder-fired missile brought down the escaping harrier seen circling CROW-EMPIRE rammed it side-on knocked it spinning out of the blue stunned the red bird fell tumbling to earth and out of sight for entertainment CROW plays with the wind - CROW soars and tumbles circles and zigzags CROW dives and darts and drops and dances like a scrap of windblown blackbag liner in spite of all that straight as the crow flies propoganda but today's the long grey day when echoing silence reigns so CROW won't fly this day he'll simply sit in his tree with his silver eyes blinking • Gwilym Williams says "Oh yeah, about me: I was in the Boat House, Laugharne, where Dylan Thomas used to live, when a poltergeist tried to bash me with a curtain pole. Thinking it was a message from the other side, I decided to pen the odd verse or two as a kind of insurance. I'm just on the right side of 60 and I'm a retired cop." Wednesday, September 5
Moonlit Burrowing – Little Gods reviewed by Matt Howard
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 05 Sep 2007 04:49 PM BST
Little Gods by Jacob Polley
Picador (2006) 51pp, £8.99 ISBN: 9780330444200 Polley’s excellent debut The Brink, published in 2003 was a remarkable critical success. The collection was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T S Eliot, Forward and John Llewellyn Rhys prizes. In Little Gods Polley presents a much more unified collection; work that is, as the blurb states, guided by ‘old-fashioned lyric inspiration’. The poems here are persistently concerned with the end of a relationship. Whilst there is not a stringent narrative in the sequencing of the poems, Polley has taken care to present a collection that starts in ‘April’ and moves towards ‘October’; the middle of the collection hinges on two poems neatly placed on opposite pages, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Morning’. The overall feel is of a difficult landscape, each image or emotion is sensitively explored; easy or sentimental conclusions are avoided. Indeed, the voice is disarmingly naked and direct, in ‘Dor Beetle’ the conjured ‘shit-eater’ is commanded ‘At the end of love, start burrowing'. It is to Polley’s great credit that poems from the seat of such emotion are harnessed into affecting lyric forms. This lyric impulse is a significant departure from The Brink, this new collection includes some truly wonderful sonnets – opening poem ‘The Owls’ is likely to be much anthologised. Polley’s ear is present in abundance, he is unafraid to use full rhymes to drive pounding rhythms, take the close of ‘The Cheapjack’ (Forward Shortlisted for best single poem 2006): …Here’s my nod, Here’s my wink, Here’s my blood for the ink. I’m begging you now; my life for the lot. The unforgiving landscape of Little Gods is littered with common images; owls, beetles, rain, the moon and glass all reoccur as powerful symbols. There is the distinct feeling of the occult in the poems, there are allusions to witches and goddesses but this is not to say that the poems follow old tropes. There are striking individual images that endure such as ‘Rain’s inconsequence to the sea’ from ‘Rain’ and in ‘Black Water’ the bitter conclusion ‘your heart’s no more than meat’. There are instances where the writing falls flat, ‘Mirror’ for example seems more like effort waiting, unable to shift gears. But such lapses are rare and each such piece is in tune with the unsettling world of the collection as a whole. Little Gods is a work that opens the door on deeply intimate emotions. That Polley can engage so forcefully for a full collection is testament to the quality of his writing. There is no easy sentiment and no saccharined ending reached; by ‘October’, the last poem listed in the collection’s contents, Polley can only conclude: Each mind’s a different, distant world This same moon will not leave. (There is an unlisted, short lyric buried at the close of the collection – you’ll have to buy it to find out what it says.) Jacob Polley has talent in spades. After two full length collections it is clear that there is real purpose to his writing. Future work from him is eagerly awaited. • Reviewed by Matt Howard Tuesday, September 4
Words that bleed by A.D.Winans
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 04 Sep 2007 02:05 PM BST
Words that bleed
She was the knife in the hands of Jack the Ripper in a heavy fog bank in a back alley in old London Town slicing dicing her way through the canvas of my heart She was the pearl-handled revolver in the hands of Dillinger that begged to be fired but never got the chance the night he was gunned down in a hail of bullets She was a keg of gunpowder waiting to be ignited Betrayed by a wet fuse the night I awoke naked and vulnerable Feeling like a voyeur walking in on two strangers making love My thoughts a mosaic tattoo on public display These wounded words that drip blood Lying still as a beached shipwreck in the bone-yard of a stranger's dreams • A.D. Winans is a regular contributor to IS&T. He is a San Francisco-based writer and poet who became involved in the West Coast Beat scene in 1958. One of his friends, the late Charles Bukowski, said of him "A.D. Winans can go ten rounds with the best of them". Sunday, September 2
T.S. Eliot's Prufrock goes multimedia
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 02 Sep 2007 10:28 PM BST
This multimedia treatment of T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock received a name check in the books section of this Saturday's Times newspaper, so we thought we'd track down the clip and let you see it for yourself. The animation is by Everett Wilson who says "I produced the visuals for this poem by T.S. Eliot in the fall of 2001,
during my brief time in the Media program at the University of
Lethbridge. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, an Animated Rendition
of T.S. Eliot's Poem appeared in the 'highlights reel' of the
Melbourne International Student Animation Festival, which traveled to
select universities across Australia. After receiving feedback on
YouTube, I replaced the original narration with T.S. Eliot's voice in
this 2007 revision."
|
Recent Photos
Categories
Who's there?
Google Ads
Twitter Updates 
|
||
