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omplished poet but a master storyteller her sense of narrative is pitch perfect she s also a superb imagist in this beautiful volume from piquant press you ll find poems steeped in the fragility and wonder of life the book is divided into six sections part one focuses on the poet s brother who is no longer the brat who snipped off my doll s eyelashes now she blesses her brother s home opens the windows to let in the hymn of the wind caressing treetops and ferns more urgently after a heart condition the poet blesses her brother s veins may their blood sing clearly glow like ripe strawberries the same sense of the fragility of life is present in the heartbreaking and life affirming section of the book where the poet deals with a son s heart attack do anything except dying as uncertainty roils around her the poet howls my love my darling child hope rips me open like birth the reader shares the relief of the son s eventual recovery because your blue lips turned pink i bloom with your gift shop roses as someone who has been obsessed for years by annie edson taylor the first person to survive going over niagara falls in a barrel i particularly like the section of the book which imagines the inner life of niagara falls daredevils as taylor anticipates the event her stomach churns white water in contrast to a briny death in a barrel taylor remembers her time in mexico and wishes her last breath would be scented with juniper and sage from the mountains another daredevil charles g stephens isn t as lucky after his failed attempt to survive the falls his hand reaches out of his barrel evocatively trapped in sleeves of white water the theme of the fragility of life and the power of love to sustain loved ones pervades this book a lover eats a white diet during radiation and lives a pale existence in contrast the poet writes i exercise in sunlight to gain strength to sustain you with love in every colour a powerful section named the thing in the mirror deals with the aftermath of a fall this time it s the poet who is supported by a lover he holds my hand and whispers you are still lovely to me particularly striking are the poet s recollections of the drive home from hospital post op noticing the beauty of the world the day steps out from a golden cloud softer than a fawn in the final section we are reminded that the stories that write us the stories of our lives flesh out their plots in our bloodstreams and bones just so you will feel the authenticity and power of this book in your bloodstream and bones this is a book that reminds me powerfully of the reasons i turn to poetry moving playful and wise this is a work to savour it s a wonderful offering by a poet at the top of her game to order your copy send 24 20 4 p h payable to donna langevin 313 39 parliament st toronto ont m5a 4r2 posted in reviews leave a comment tom gannon hamilton reviews love is a side effect of life poems by andy lee posted on december 12 2019 by stanley fefferman andy lee love is a side effect of life casa del alma 2019 asin b081lskj8g from the first poem in his book the elements of andy lee s refreshing style are clearly in evidence contemporary poetry can be many things but its two most baleful tendencies are polar opposites on the one hand a rhythmic windiness and on the other self constraint leading to a sort of cryptic shorthand luckily for the reader lee writes outside the magnetic fields of both schisms his concise forms marry natural diction with a hitherto unvoiced metaphysics to crystalline effect as in astral travel which perceptively juxtaposes ways of knowing sea knows your secrets i know your ghost the subject lover is at once engulfed concealed and known by a dense vast impersonal presumably social medium but the speaker poet knows the ethereal soul of the beloved who in turn substantiates him i ascend from your depths reformed from ether to fibre thus a lover s experience self realization through immersion in the world of the other is brilliantly enacted original imagery flows in thought provoking juxtapositions to express ideas that prosaic verbiage could never approach as if stating the claim for all verse the nameless is named through a turning of the subject matter mechanical jackals of the cybernetic present yield to the classical chariot piercing the pale horizon elsewhere in this collection reverie our specific historical moment meets the universal passing between colossal capitalist columns the speaker s revolución a triumph of consciousness manifests as an inverse freefall into the soft cosmos the title never leave a burning child unattended cleverly blends adages that warn against being careless with open flames and neglectful in the supervision of kids in our daily routine recycled daylight the destructed combines dissolution and distraction a mood enhanced by constructions such as prehistoric punchline and amniotic ocean there s a sense of intimate solitude further developed in bumbling through love a comic indictment of online dating in love is a side effect of life the title poem the desert and the pacific present a geomorphological leitmotif that will resonate with most readers lee conjures the beauty our forebears knew embracing objective and subjective natural and social domains in primitive oral poetic imagery the speaker detects a latent danger in clouds situating us on the same topography as those dead sages for whom everything was a sign to be interpreted today s faded emblems are contrasted with ancient more potent associations of eros with death a reverse birth of osiris alluding to the egyptian god also the greek myth of orpheus both involving resurrection to strengthen these already potent archetypes he awakens alone bleeding from your kiss an utterance that transcends its vampiric connotations to sustain the poet s juggling of solitary with interpersonal or personal with global concerns our preoccupations with love beauty and art can get pretty stodgy but andy lee keeps it light in loving you is a cloisterfuck wherein we are treated to the poet s characteristically vivid metaphors you redact me for the last time heatseeker still locked on my heart from love s gutter gives us dad dyad and dead in a single breath and the near oxymoron next nostalgia suggests the mutual saturation of emerging circumstance and memory a familiar though generally unvoiced state in a country song a buffer between your heart and his charisma hints at something equally subtle and elusive desert poem reflects on the atonement that follows upon error exit wound is a double entendre focusing on the severity of injury one feels when a bullet or a lover leaves us in hunter conch sea dream and death in the evening we find emotionally available enigmatic allegories for physical affection the poems are sequenced so as to lend them added layers of context and enhance their meaning the periphery of memory offers some especially appealing lines a series of clauses running from as time shears your mind away to we are sliding back to love seeker points to a dream s capacity to resonate beyond its own temporality so we are primed for the most compact gemlike poem in this volume tender trap which reads headlong plunge into your tender trap i come in pieces against your hard surfaces pre demented ready to tango embodied in the ensuing group of poems is a critique of the electronic ethos this follows in true dialectical fashion from poems earlier in the book that venerate the sagacity of our ancestors carbon copy hones in on certain cyber age excesses the digital soup the simulacra in which humanity might altogether go missing the pithy phrasing in generation hexed addicted to next craving a glib fix broadcasting personas lifetime of waste braces us for the salutary dictum advanced in poetry shall persist to make the ineffable indelible which rises like a mission statement from the printed page and sets up final call with its vision of poetry as dna against a backdrop of soporific skies and its bold directive that could be an epitaph exhume and resurrect my words so i live infinite love is a side effect of life is full of speech enriching takeaways the most substantive poem is saved for the end its rhythms working effortlessly through euphonic strophes the oxytocin has oxidized and in a vision she s breastfeeding a blue whale towards the consummate agreement of content and form straining to recall the harmonies of a long forgotten song the book s suitably musical conclusion we have a beginning here too insofar as the poet is bound to scope out an ever broadening vista one of canada s best emerging poets andy lee brings glad tidings the stylistic achievement in this sample of twenty two poems bodes well for the future of canadian letters and for the literate world in which humanity is re invented posted in reviews leave a comment thomas gannon hamilton s panoptic reviewed by john b lee posted on april 25 2019 by stanley fefferman thomas gannon hamilton panoptic aeolus house 2018 110 pp i s b n 978 1 987872 13 2 which brings me to your assignment nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes the optic heart must venture a jailbreak and recreation lines from margaret avison s sonnet snow every book is an artifact a technology a delivery system for the work to be found within the covers and as such first impressions involve an apprehension of and appreciation for those qualities that are particular to the publisher s attention to presentation in the case of aeolus house and thomas gannon hamilton s book panoptic the poems within are honoured by the beauty and clarity of production the cover stock the paper and the legible font all contribute to the dignity that these fine poems deserve the illustrations throughout compliment the poetry the cover illustration by hamilton with its use of feng shui its complimentary combination of water flora fauna and architecture and its rainbow colouring of feminine and masculine human figures provides an introduction to the themes we will find within the opening pen and ink illustration of a swallowtail imago followed within the book by equally lovely images of catfish swimming tail to tail and what appear to be mandalas of wheat woven within and emerging from the corolla of a paper flower in combination with hamilton s opening epigram this garden blooms in fall combine to prepare us for the delights that will follow when we begin to read and i can tell you without equivocation that hamilton does not disappoint his work is complex without being needlessly obscure deeply engaged with the world he inhabits and profoundly erudite without being arrogant the reader lingers turns a phrase every which a way under the light of understanding sustained by the music that serves the theme and then is rewarded if not always emerging from the experience unscathed it s a long book packed with long line poems many of which are two to three pages in length so i ll concentrate my attention in this review on four poems the opening poem the closing poem the eponymous to the title of the book poem and the poem that made me laugh out loud so often that i read it and re read it to amuse my silly self but then i once coined the question what s the difference between being solomon and being sirius so you might forgive my deep appreciation of the truly funniest poem in the book the opening poem caul and the closing poem mount pleasant provide us with something of a framing device in that caul deals with birth and mount pleasant an apt coda is a seven verse contemplation of death and mortality the alpha poem rather than being metaphysical is an odd poem concerning a baby born fully enrobed in the amniotic sac a one in eighty thousand rarity i m reminded of the star child in kubrick s film 2001 when hamilton compares his own christening to the first cosmonaut who left earth well in advance of his lift off prior to his re entry and splash down i had already made my entrance the originality of hamilton s perceptions and the quirkiness of sensibility enrich the reader s experience throughout this volume in his closing poem he writes when you are little you learn to classify the living and make distinctions between those you ve seen die and you ve journeyed here if you read this book from front to back by way of an intelligence that is restless and never satisfied with the obvious surfaces of life the range and depth of this poet s concerns remind the reader of the importance of both breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding he becomes something of a reliable guide directing our attention and illuminating what we see and what we experience is sometimes achingly sad as he writes of the untimely death of a lover best friend husband wife or someone you love no less and the journey through grief is equal to the music of orpheus and his doomed beloved eurydice the pain is almost too much to bear like hamlet contemplating yorick we are brought to the edge of the grave to think upon this ultimate enterprise each holds an equal share all have a common stake yet you distinguish still you compare and i note the way that word yet lingers at the line s end before tumbling to you distinguish and the final words of the closing poem still you compare and is that not the poet s lot to compare to seek a metaphor for the strangest and most mysterious of all experiences our own mortality we are born only to die this need not be morbid or ghoulish contemplation like the gravedigger s comic relief there are lines in this poem that elicit a smile as it is with the punning of the grave differences leading to a list junior and gramps magnate minion maven twit and so on the wit in these lines does not go unnoticed and the rhyming of twit with the phrase pulses quit disallows the reader from descending into a dark mood commensurate with the overplaying of morbidity in the title poem panoptic i am reminded of avison s importuning of the reader to fully engage the world in her sonnet snow the idea that in order to understand and appreciate experience the individual must engage in active cognition nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes she writes and hamilton s opening salvo in his poem diminished as i am in your ears i cannot get between them enter and leave without a hearing the way rodents and roaches cross more freely than thoughts from one cell to another the word panoptic is all by itself an invitation to engage and the poem ends with an echo reference though diminished in your eyes as the opening line in the last verse understanding these lines is not easy work but wrestling with them is damned rewarding play like avison hamilton rewards reading and rereading the music sustains and the effort rewards and then there s the quirky home ec a poem in which the speaker is a teacher and the reader is privy to the reactions of an imaginary class wherein we are invited to contemplate the joy of cooking squirrels rabbits woodchucks opossums beavers raccoons bears and finally humans ...