Current Reviews
Richard Tylman
John Amen
Wayne Ray
Current Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Reviews
More of Me Disappears - poems by John Amen
A Review by David Fraser
After reading John Amen's second collection of poetry, More of Me Disappears, readers will feel as if they
have been thrown " in to the throat of things". John Amen's world is a surreal revolving door of imagery
and ominous metaphor that captures you spinning then releases you to struggle with the uneasiness he
presents upon the page.
Opening poems such as "The Consummation" and "Things Are Happening Too Fast" create an
arid atmosphere with imagery and strange metaphor. "Without warning,/the river runs dry
its spine/as glutted and songless as any morgue," or "The wings of the world/are flapping
like a fish in a dry pail." There is a sense of the wasteland of T.S. Eliot. The poet searches
for brotherly love and regrets the passing of better times. He endures "immune to tomorrow's
taunting". There is a foreboding with fish dying in a pail, - a sense of dread for what is
happening to our world -, the poet terrified by what he knows he can destroy, and a weeping
for the loss of things.
"Last Words" depicts a last farewell as if the poet wishes he were going off
into the cosmos, preparing to die, or find "true transcendence. He is adrift, cut loose,
disembodied "imploding like a flattened can", the opposite of the "big bang". He is going
back to the stars and forsaking this mad dysfunctional world.
Things are out of whack. The poem "In The Making" has a fork stuck in the moon's eye,
the sky opening "like an earring clasp", a deaf domina, irises made of plastic.
He is the boa and the canary, the predator and the prey that struggles to sing. The imagery is jarring, unsettling and not explicit, leaving the reader with the sense of discomfort. A maggot sips blood from his flip-flop; here something is ugly and casual at the same time. "Roads are potholed, littered with skulls/of a past generation's ambition." "The nanny cannot find her prosthetic leg." "The moon is bulging like a boil." A baby is "floating facedown in the swimming pool." A cigarette burns on the altar. There is "blood on the blackboard,/ lunchboxes scattered in the gymnasium", "a shotgun shell in the sandbox".
In "PS From Paradise", with its ironic title, we see that the mint is on fire,
green smog hovers over the playground, the roof leaks, the elevator doors will
not close, a gay couple is married submerged and hidden beneath the sea.
Other poems become more narrative and personal. "Verboten", also an ironic title,
talks about the questions that still need to be asked regarding the holocaust and
the answers that need to be given. "Angelica Tells Her Story" is representative of the tales
of the war torn disenfranchised that need to be remembered and retold. Similarly "So Many Lives"
narrates reminiscences of times less held together, less calm in a world of drugs, alcohol,
unemployment, and overdosed roommates. In "Narcissism" we find the poet combing the late
night streets to save women, heroin-damsels, and the reader gets a glimpse of the hunger
in the writer, a hunger as in "During A Lull" to clean up the world, terra-form a planet.
There is a madness that is portrayed. In "The Consummation" John Amen says "so many voices in the
vestibule of anger/Noah's beasts go mad in their cages." In "The Legacy" he says, "we are in this
madness together/feasting at a smorgasbord of hunger." In "The Ascent" "a madman beats his oars
against the water." He beats but he does not row; he does not progress. In "New York Memory #3"
an allusion to bees and hives brings in the similar mad nature of the world in which humanity spins.
"…How the mad/hive continues, greater than any one member", so beyond the control of any one person's
quest to right the world. "Walking Unsure of Myself" creates a similar sense of a world gone mad, a
sense of the ominous through single statements that leave little vivid snapshots of foreboding as
the poet casts his ballot on Election Day 2004. In "The Void" the poet says, "The mad race to
fill the empty room begins."
There is an emptiness depicted in many poems. In "The Void" the poet stands "alone in
the cipher-house" wanting salvation but ends up with "the poison ivy of hollow hours."
In "Through Mist The Size of Elephant Tusks" "the jungle's face/has been shaved/like
a model's armpit", empty where the beasts have died. There is some resignation to the
flow of things, possibly without much hope for improvement. In "It Is Already Decided"
a crazed voice on the other end of a phone shrieks that the new messiah has been delivered
stillborn. In "In A Given Moment" life goes on with its process and entropy, "dead skin
will fall from us soon", "the dice will not stop tumbling". Maybe god does play dice
with the universe. The wheel spins backward in a roulette of randomness, but with
the morning here again each day with its secret carried such a long way, maybe there is hope.
In "Vacillations" John Amen says "Each day more of me disappears but also each day more of
him is revealed as his "lyrics flow like lamb's blood". We get to see this agony of writing
and living, his sense of sacrifice, words, images, strange metaphors leaking onto the page,
portraying the darkness and the loss, but not without some hopeful quest to find the wheat
full and the crickets reveling outside his window.
More of Me Disappears will make you ponder, will jar you into a state of alert intensity,
and will make you read each poem wanting more and more.
E-mail: Contact
John Amen Ascent: Ascent Aspirations Magazine E-mail: Contact
Ascent To read reviews and testimonials for Going to the Well click on the sidebar under "Collections" To read more poetry and short fiction by David Fraser click on Poetry and Short Fiction respectively.