The title of this book of poems is especially apt for its new more clearly discursive slant, built on techniques and formal structures Raphael has been developing for some years now. These are large poems, each one filling an 8.5 x 11" page or more, dealing passionately but not simplistically with such large questions as human survival or "purpose", the evolution of consciousness, and social and cultural decay or change, all couched in an intensely expressed surrealist discourse glittering with the "ephemera" of daily life:
I can see the music in the blood of the guy running
down the alley pushing a shopping cart with a tv inside
it, repeatedly looking over his shoulder at the miniature
cars which like a pack of dogs keep trying to jump
& fly into the low-lying clouds of meat teasing
all below with the threat or treat of carmine rain...
(from "Shopping Cart")
These poems, which include so much and range over such broad territories, remain rigorously focused on particular themes or qualities of consciousness. This partly explains why their endings seem so convincing, and, although often formally trailing off, provide an amazing sense of closure:
if only our bodies were aligned
not this inexorable clash into himalaya of unresolved momentum,
rolling over like dogsdogs inhaling each minute like meat,
each om-bark silkily draping the light at the end of
the moon snaps open
(from "Divercity")
No brief review can do justice to these important new poems. Essential reading.--John M. Bennett
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #3,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1993, 1995.