Category Archives: Poetry

Amor de Lonh, by Gabriel Olearnik

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Amor de Lonh by Gabriel Olearnik, Guest Reviewed by Grace Andreacchi
Andromache Books, London, 2009
The composer Robert Schumann once described the music of the man who is still arguably the Pole par excellence to the non-Polish world, Frédéric Chopin, as ‘a cannon buried in flowers’, and this isn’t a bad description of what the Polish-British poet Gabriel Olearnik is up to either. To carry the analogy a bit further, as Chopin built upon the old classical style with new, exciting harmonies, so Olearnik makes use of the rich traditions of the medieval troubadours as well as those found in such deeply reflective and intellectual poets as T.S. Eliot and Zbigniew Herbert to create a burning bright new poetry of the mind.
There is of course an earlier poetical work known as Amor de Lonh, that of the twelfth century prince, Jaufré Rudel. His enigmatic verses on the theme of distant love serve as a template for this new Amor de Lonh, in which every kind of obstacle, both internal and external, must be vanquished before the soul is free to fly upwards towards its goal. Olearnik’s book opens with a translation from the French troubadour. Continue reading →

Escapades: Selected Prose Poems 2007 by Roger Aplon

 
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I received in the mail a package from Roger Aplon, who is a participant in this year’s OW Chap Swap, and was pleasantly surprised.
He is a well educated writer from many places around the world, but makes his home now in San Diego, CA. I was drawn to the brilliantly red cover of Escapades which was designed by Jane Darroch Riley. For the life of me, I could not find a publisher on this little chap so one must assume he has produced this himself. It is a beautiful book for being self published with richly textured cardstock and crisp white pages laced with delicate typeface. Continue reading →

"(Neocom)muter",Paul Corman-Roberts

 
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Neocom(muter) is the newest book of poetry by Paul Corman-Roberts, published by Tainted Coffee Press. (2009) The cover art by Andrew Lander is really the first thing that will grab you about this book: the figure on the front is confronting you, stopping you dead in your tracks. You’re being urged to take pause: Just Stop. Step away from the treadmill, life is happening while we are too busy living, as they say. And to me, that is what Corman-Roberts is talking about here but he takes it a step further. We’re not just “commuters” moving back and forth in the business of living, we are becoming so consumed with the process that we are almost detatching, not fully participating. The new kind of commuter is living to serve the rat race, not participating in the rat race so he may live. It is this difference that Corman-Roberts seems to explore, here and there in his work, but quite directly in this collection.

Cover of (neocom)muter, Andrew Lander

Cover of (neocom)muter, Andrew Lander

What’s Corman-Roberts doing here? What is he setting you up for, confronting you with?

Everything. He’s packed the world into the trunk of the Corolla, a mix of things- some pretty heavy baggage. It starts off with damage: “charred satellites”, near-misses, the fallout from choices, being products of the past.

“Beach Secrets” was a strange choice for me, in it’s placement as the second poem. It seems like a departure, with it’s ocean smell radiating like radio waves from some epicenter on the shore. The untreated sewage in the face of such a calibrated society- is he reminding us that there are still organic elements, byproducts of living, that have the power to come back at us? There’s something in the organic that often refuses to be denied, from the septic to the decomposing, life remains a part of life for the commuter. Like the figure on the cover, it will confront you on the platform. You can run, travel arrogant on your rails, but you can’t hide from truths like mortality, like stench, like “dried blood”, bitterness, like the pets that make a mess of the morning commute. (continued) Continue reading →