By Cardinal Cox previously appeared in Star*Line (USA), Mar/April '01
16pp, A5, 2001, Free for postage (from UK send two loose 50p stamps)
Opossum Hollwer Tarot Press, 5094 N. County Road 750 E, Orleans, Indiana, IN-47452, USA
This slim poetry collection is a striking introduction to the horror and dark fantasy poetry of a writer hitherto known for his science fiction and music. It also porovides a brief but intriguing biography; and illustrations include an eyecatching cover, a 'Darkl Tower' by Larry Blazek.
The poems, which included both rhymed and unrhymed work, cover such themes as the lamia, pictured with vivid brevity in a nightclub setting - "her coils grow tight/Losing clothes as she'd shed her skin"; 'Maggot in the Fruit' with its darkly romantic picture of a vampire's liberation; the sinister mythologising of 'Step The Maze', six lines crystalising faithless Aridane's "jig of the labyrinth"; and the hypnotic 'From Ammenta', an undead Egyptian enduring the pains of immortality with grim stoicism - "foul centuries I hunt you/Dry, withered, by Horus' ray/Storm across the desert's blue".
Particularly fascinating is 'For Janie', a poem without overt horror elements, yet implicitly redolent of coming tragedy; the voice of a married mill girl's lodger-cum-lover speaks to us with the direct simplicity of a traditional ballad - "place a pansy on my pillow/And I'll come to you at night (..) kiss your fingers in the morning/While birds chorus in the tree."
Anyone interested in original approaches to the themes and possibilities of the dark poem should send-off for this.
By AC Evans previously appeared in extended form in Twink
320pp, 1999, ISBN 1-900152-28-2
Stride Publications, 11 Sylvan Road, Exeter, Devon, EX4 6EW, UK
This massive collection of poems and prose-poem 'texts' reflects, as the author points-out in his Introduction, the tension of his work between "the fantastic and the realistic".
In practice, this means that something over half the work is 'mainstream'; however, that, in turn, leaves well-over a hundred pages of work which is "in the fantastic mode", ie genre of various kinds. This includes work material which is, again to use the author's own categories for convenience, "visionary apocalyptic", "cosmological vision", "horror", "science fiction", "occult/esoteric", and "ancient myths, legends and The Books of the Dead-inspired".
For the purposes of this reviuew, I intend to look only at the "fantastic mode" material, but even setting that limitation, from a work of this size, it is clearly only possible to look closely in a reasonable-length review at a small selection of pieces, a selection which hopefully gives a meaningful flavour of the whole, or, at least, the "fantastic" part.
Before turning to individual work, however, it is perhaps of relevance to note that Stride Press' guidelines say specifically that the press is not open to science fiction work, and that collections for consideration should include meterial previously published in 'reputable magazines'. So, it indicates the power of Evans' work that he has convinced Stride to publish a collection containing much material which is science fictional, and much which previously appeared in genre little magazines, not generally likely to be considered by the 'litcrit' establishment as falling within the magic circle of the 'reputable'.
Turning to hopefully representative individual poems, the eleven lines of 'Metacropolis' tell us of "an ark/of stone", perhaps from some future civilisation, in which, alchemical-uinionwise, "time/deepens out/of mind".
In the short, Lovecraftian (ie at the cosmic horror end of the SF spectrum of moods/themes) 'Primal Scene Monster', the title entity "lives in the gulfs of chaos", in "a void/within a void", providing a paradigm of "eternal hunger". At the same time, of course, the "primal scene" operates at a human as well as cosmic, scale, at the level of Freudian awakening of sexual awareness through witness - who here is the voyeur, the poet or all of us?
'Not Dead But Changed' recalls the seeings of a 19th C visionary prophetess, an East Anglian villagter who foretold "great pikes and lances" to descend upon the ravaged earth"; her cries come back upon our time when the warning is, of course, too late; these things, like the aerial warships she also previsioned, have already happened, indeed been with us long enough to become wearisomely familiar companions to our Now.
It would seem that, for Evans, only the vast, inevitably remote abstractions so beloved of mystical alchemy, so desperately but vainly sought through the ages by its practitioners, could bridge gaps unbridgeable to ordinary human possibility. And, then those bridgings - as it were like James Blish's unimaginable gravity bridge on Jupiter, built by remote control by humans yet inaccessible and unusable for Man - are bridgings solely linking such vastnesses of megaentities, not joining them and us (or us and them) in understanding.
So, to the extent that the glorisouly all-transfiguring union dreamt of in the search fro the Alchemical Marriage - or modern science's for a unifying Theory of Everything - understanding of All, from greatest to smallest, with the scientist in the grip of the ancient dream of "as above, so below" as s/he atytempts to observe (impossibly, without distorting by observation) the strange "loves" of sub-atomic particles or Black Hole plughole-circling galaxies - can or could exist, in this poet's understanding of the Art, at least - it is in the meeting/mingling/mating of phenomena far beyond humanity, godlike in size and power but certainly not in caring, for us or indeed for any human-scale intelligence.
So, in "Black Hole Binary (Phantom Companion)" - which, illustrating the fluid limpidity with which Evans sl;ipstreams culture/mindset boundaries, speaks of vast astronomical phenomena in the language of gnostic mysticism - there is "glacial ecstacy" for "the two/gripped by radiant/indeterminate/mid-time/dense point".
In such union, a devouring gulf embracing a ghostly star, there are curious echoes, too, of the Romantic/Gothic obsessions with the deadly passion of scarlet maneater or pallid tomb-girl. So, oddly, perhaps one of Evans' most unusual achievements here is also to give striking poetic form to a new variety of the myriad faces lust turns towards impossible objects of affection.
