Ascent: Ascent Aspirations Magazine

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Order the Book: Mail cheques to David Fraser, 1560 Arbutus Drive,Nanoose Bay, BC, V9P 9C8

Price (including shipping and handling) $17.95 CND or $17.95 US (Shipped to Us destinations) or $19.95 US (Shipped to all international destinations except the USA).

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About the Book: Testimonials and Reviews

This publication is his first collection of poetry. Whether writing poetry or short fiction, David examines characters struggling with time and entropy, with relationships and with finding meaning in lives often caught up and stagnant in their own existence, their aging and their loss. Many poems deal with the darkside of the human condition as a political protest to man’s inhumanity to man, and to man’s blatant disregard for our greatest resource, Mother Earth. However within this dark perspective there is tenderness and hope and lyrical imagery of what life wonderfully can be.

"David Fraser looks up, looks around him, takes in his surroundings, and does a good job of reporting on nature as a vital restorative element in our lives." - David Chorlton

"David Fraser's 'Going to the Well' is a remarkable journey filled with a zest for all that life offers. His poems surprise, delight, and enrich the reader. They truly deepen our understanding of the human condition...all in all, this collection represents a most impressive debut." - Vernon Waring

"David's words will linger in your mind long after your eyes have left the page."-Pam Daum

I found in Mr. Fraser's work not only elegiac words about human beings self dispossed from their natural endowment, but also words of hope and optimism arising from reverence for things that charm and challenge us with the riddle as well as the promise of their existence. Indeed Heidegger's comments came to mind. The philosopher, in this context, holds poets in high esteem and comments in his Introduction To Metaphysics that " Poetry, like the thinking of the philosopher, has always so much world space to spare that in it each thing - a tree, a mountain, a house, the cry of a bird - loses all indifference and commonplaceness " - Al Staffetti

It was a pleasure reading your book, and I want to say that "Going To The Well" is probably one of the best I’ve read so far. Your skillful means of penetrating into the heart of darkness is profound and full of insights, that leaves one questioning themselves, about ones own struggle, failure, guilt and ills, as well as natures struggle with society. Overall it attempts to extract truth from all directions and inspires a broad level of perception, exposing a deeper sense of existence too. By far, the book completes a personal experience and an image of humanity’s dark and lighter side of the self. I have enjoyed the book to the fullest, all the way from Singapore. - Albert Lawrence

"David's poetry embues vivid imagery and great depth of feeling. He has the ability to draw on inside each experience so as to touch the very essence of life itself... The vocabulary is very evocative for me as a painter and at the same time allows me to use my own imagination at will. I loved reading the poems." - Philippa Haidu

Review:

Going to the Well

By David Fraser

2004; 94 pp; Pa; Ascent Aspirations Poetry,

1560 Arbutus Drive, Nanoose Bay,

British Columbia, Canada

V9P 9C8.

By SAM VARGO

David Fraser's first collection of poetry doesn't celebrate society's virtues. The work shows the darker side of humankind's innert nature. Much of the poetry deals with man's inhumanity to man, with stagnant lives and an ongoing entropy consuming all. Fraser's own self-described way of writing involves dealving into the darker side of human existence and how we interrelate not only within society, but also with nature. Even naturalism plays a part, with some of the collection concerned with society's relationship and constant adversity with natural law.

If all this sounds pessimistic, it is. In reading Going to the Well, one would most likely come away with a feeling that some of the things we do, although accepted as standards, are not the best we can do, nor should they be seen as acceptable norms. Compounding the feeling is the realization that Fraser does not write of the big macrocosmic universe as we know it, but rather, the microsmic simple things, such as: watching credits after a movie, picking blackberries, how compost turns to fertilizer, a son's concept of his father, scenarios taking place at a thrift shop, and two curmudgeons fighting over a virginal, and very artificial pristine sign of spring (a man-made cherry blossom tree). Fraser's 94 poems fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Each little aspect of living evolves into an awesome and stark big picture/puzzle.

The poems contained in this weird didactic yet existential mixture are are short, clipped and in the tradition of minimalism. Words are treated like a highly budgeted monetary system -- with a stringent stinginess wherein not a consonant nor a vowel is wasted. The poetry is clear and to the point, not pretentious. Most of the work is relatively easy to grasp. Reasoning and logic prevail and the poems do not contain meanings or inticacies that are hidden, nor are any dressed up in pretention. Fraser seems to have written Going to the Well for an audience broader than just the scholar, poet or literati'.

Samples of Poetry in Going to the Well

Going to the Well can also be purchased at the following bookstores on Vancouver Island: Fraser & Naylor in Ladysmith, P.B. Cruise in Nanaimo, Falconer Books in Nanaimo, Mulberry Bush Books in Parksville and Qualicum Beach, The Blue Heron in Comox, The Laughing Oyster in Courtney and TLC in the Red Gap Plaza in Nanoose Bay.

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