3. Body as a Home for this Darkness, by Maeve Mckenna (2023). I bought this book directly from Ms. Mckenna, an Irish poet I discovered through the litrag Rattle. This slim collection of poems is more than a sum of its parts, and all the poems cohere in a nice fashion (not that I think that is always necessary or desirable). It is a testament to her late father, and deals primarily in the theme of grief, filtered through vivid memories, recent past experiences of being a caregiver, and present experiences of dealing with the estate. There is beauty here, and wisdom. Occasionally she plays with formatting, but she is at her best when she writes in free verse stanzas, where the suppleness of her joy in language shines. In the poem "The Morning after Reading the Will," she echoes Tolstoy's famous quotation that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" when she riffs ". . . Every family is fractured by revelations of being itself" (21). The lack of capitalization on "being" suggests that the revelations aren't about existence as such, but about the times that our overly socialized masks drop in moments of stress and tension, our being-together as ourselves without these masks. I was bowled over by the beauty of such passages as "Holy statues suggest forgiveness, a pet/fish ingests faeces, the moon/howls allegations and binmen are out/and ripped, slapping shut overnight lids/their deep throat shoulder blades of inked/tongues speaking fake bruises onto skin." For once, it's a moon reference in a poem that is not eye-rolling, and what a fresh way to describe a man's tattoos! This is a tightly-knit poetry collection that rewards multiple readings.
4. Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master: Texts and Interviews by Genesis Breyer P-orridge, Peter Christopherson, and Jon Savage (2018).
This book I bought from the publisher Trapart Books because I am a big fan of William Burroughs, and in a book of interviews with him called The Job, he said he derived the technique of cut-ups he used in composition for his Nova Trilogy (of which The Soft Machine is a favourite of mine) from Brion Gysin. I had no idea, however, that I was in for a rollicking account of the social world of some of the twentieth century's most important artists. Brion's life was truly astonishing and worthy of an epic biopic. He knew everyone, from the original group of Surrealist painters and writers in Paris in the 1920s, through the Beat writers, through the personnel of the Rolling Stones and Beatles, to legendary Joujouka musicians, to even Yves St. Laurent and the power behind the throne of the Church of Scientology. He himself was primarily known as a painter, although he seems somewhat of a polymath. He wrote a book called The History of Slavery in Canada, as well as books about the "Beat Hotel" in Paris, and a novel or two. His views on the cut-up are the most fascinating, but he swears his most important contribution to the world was the Dreammachine. He claims that if he had managed to find a way to mass-produce it, it would have become the non-drug alternative to heightened states of consciousness in the 1960s. From his descriptions, it sounds like it's a more elaborate version of closing your eyes and staring at a strobe light, which renders beautiful patterns and arabesques on your eyelids. He calls it an "art-object" although clearly it is somewhat of an invention as well. Someone who experienced it said that it rendered the art museum superfluous because it inspired such beautiful visions. I also quite enjoyed his description of experiences of running a restaurant in Morocco. It was refreshing to encounter his prescient anti-transphobia, but his gay misogyny was a bit disheartening. We can't all be perfect, I suppose. What an astonishing life and work!
5. Second Nature by John Schertzer (2023). To be honest, I'm still wading through this chunky book of poems. It's very dense, but the quality is extraordinarily high. As it somewhat loosely clusters groups of poems under headings such as "An Economy Can Remember Us," "Drop Scenes," "Convenience Struggles," and "Plan for a Broken Bowl" (which I hope is a reference to Henry James' masterpiece of frustrated love The Golden Bowl), it is not as tightly knit as the aforementioned collection. However, after reading the first twenty or so poems, I have a feeling this is going to become a favourite poetry book of mine. I am in no hurry to finish it, as I love to relish poetry slowly. He clearly writes in a lineage I myself write in: heavily influenced by avant-garde schools of poetry such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and the Black Mountain and New York schools of modern poetry. I love the two-faced "Seventeen," which originally presents itself as a group of 17 seemingly unrelated poetic declarations, such as "A trash receptacle in a labyrinth," "Questions answering themselves silently," and "Oblique circles of days matching the moon." Each declaration is numbered. If you read the poem again, however, and mentally delete the numbers, a certain flow emerges between the declarations, and motifs of circularity emerge and serve to unify the poem. If you're looking for straight-forward lyric or narrative poetry, this is not going to be your cup of tea. This is cerebral stuff, folks, which is why I'm going to take my time with this one.
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