Ascent Aspirations Magazine

Reviews

Separate Destinations

By

Kendall Evans and David C Kopaska-Merkel

Byrenlee Press. Riverdale, New York

In association with Abyss & Apex. Baton Rouge, Louisiana

http://wwwdplus66.com/

A Review by David Fraser, Editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine

Entering into the covers of this delightfully absurd, profound, whimsical collection of speculative poetry you will feel the tug of gravity, the folding in of time and space, the sense of separate destinations in a sea of conflicted thought. Inside these poems you are the time traveler, the proverbial wanderer making tracks, examining boot prints for clues, sensing your isolation and aloneness in the vastness of the universe while through the lyrical language of the narrators things fall apart, break down, evolve and metamorphose.

In “Parchment Found In An Antique Book”, the opening poem, we experience a monologue of thought transmitted by a lone space and time traveling brother who is now back in an “alien stillborn past” world, cut off from the group mind of his fellow brothers. We sense his anxiety, his fear as he relates with a temporary solitary sweetheart, a female, real in this time, but long dead in the passage of time from which this traveler has come. We feel his excitement for the simple life of fresh-brewed ale, hand-carved crafts, the tactile sensuous moments milking a goat, making candles slowly and methodically and we see this traveler caught and confused in the contrasting imagery of autonomy and unity, individuality and conformity and we wonder as his heart battles with his head which realm will he eventually embrace.

In “Of Time And The Teeth Of The Black Dog” we enter and leave the lines of poetry through the bones of the narrator’s sister, through a metaphorical door to the world of the Black Dog, the bell jar with its associations of enclosure, preservation, vacuum, madness. Here we are on the dark side, locked in by gravity as on earth, moving, emotionally drained toward madness. The narrator is stranded, unable to divine his fate, speculating on using his “lover’s toenail clippings” to do the trick, but he is needing to appease fierce unknown adversaries “on the bottom of this sea of sky.” Even the firmament above him is pressing down with the weight of the ocean’s depths.

He speculates that all of us are trapped, scattered over “far-flung locations”, amid the desert, “bound and blind in the ruins of a still-potent abandoned city”. The landscape is harsh and even the wolf and the dog with their ominous howling are abandoned and cut off on “ a wave-dashed reef”. There is the contrast of the dryness of the desert and the imagery of the sea, but both environments are severe and lonely. Here as with Prometheus who gave fire to mankind, we are trapped as a dogfish, not a monstrous eagle eats not our liver but our kidneys.

In the last stanza our present world creeps in. The “car breaks down in the middle of an endless sea of grass”. There are no roads, no answers, and all that is left is the waking in the morning to find the narrator walking alone only to come upon his sister’s bones once again in a hot dusty basin dried by the wind. This narrator is all of us, trapped in a dry place searching for our future.

The aloneness of these voices is haunting especially in “Immortal’s Lament”. What agony would exist in the heart of an immortal after all the stars go out, the moon no longer shines, and the surface of the earth is a dry corpse? Our immortal circles the globe in a coffin-like capsule, sustained in a life without a meaning, questing for a reason to go on living. He states when everything is gone, when “the dark moon’s tides have lost their rhythm”, when all is dead, “they call this living;” We are left with the haunting image of one soul circling a dead planet where there is no hope for a new beginning.

In “Variations On The Songs Of Seraphim Downloaded To A Hybrid Medium” we are turned upside down. The floor of our existence is removed so that we free fall through the absurd bizarre imagery of mice whose whiskers’ twitching change the fate of the universe; of rats that gnaw away at the structures and the laws we hold sacred in their ability to hold it all together amid the entropy of things breaking down, falling apart; of ghosts crabs burrowing into our private thoughts; of crop circles being some mathematical or numerical notation to lay out a score for heavenly or angelic music. If we look closer at these mice and their missing tracks, maybe there lie the vestiges of poetry. We begin the poem with tracks, the tracks of mice, lines in the sand, ink on paper, but the mice jump as if through some wormhole into a delightful, ephemeral world of the absurd.

In “Migration” lyrical language abounds – “petals of fire unfold upon the moon”, “flown metal flesh into exploding suns”, “taken flight with Jove’s bright birds of paradise”. In “Walking The Dog” we take a whimsical look at Mrs. Irma Grady in a neighborhood of the future, walking a cybernetic dog, not “ol’ Fuzz”, small, timid and retiring, but a “Sirius canine”, genetically altered with “fragmented strands of DNA” descending from huskies, wolves, hyena, and jackals. She is safe under the dark night sky.

“Reefs” is a strange poem of evolution, and metamorphosis. On a planet beneath alien stars the narrator and Y’londra camp to the smell of coffee and bacon, but somewhere in their dreams the reefs exist, a huge collective organism that beckons, brings Y’londra home, changes her into a creature of the sea and hurls the narrator against the reef, and washes him onto the shore. This is the medium from which evolution spread; a strange primordial world that, unlike the narrator and his friend, does not dream, just is.

In “Patchwork Land” we return to tracks and tracking, footprints in time and space. The desert is expanding, “time is out of joint”. Tectonic forces are changing the landscape even as the narrator sleeps, even in his dreams. He is a “patchwork man in the chaos of this patched together landscape.” He is searching for answers, tracks that seem random and may lead nowhere, or in “contradictory directions”. The wanderer is every man searching for meaning, for answers to his past and maybe his present and future. The house he finds at the end of the poem is a house of his past, of memory, and relationship. In the windows are the faces of many women, his father, his son, and in one opaque reflection of the sun the image of himself. He has traversed the desert and the bog, places of death and danger, and now found, in the embodiment of the house, the things he has been searching for, by the ocean, the waves, a place of life.

In “Separate Destinations” two AI clones fly the unique landscape of space with its exploding suns, black holes and icy comets, until one perishes crashing “in a cometary grave”. The survivor asks when he will be joined again with his clone and the perished clone answers that out of the comet where he crashed and has been “cannibalized by microbes” he will be reborn and will “inoculate” other worlds, other suns in far-flung nebulae with all his “hybrid selves”. The imagery is of dust to dust. We are all stardust, cycling through the universe, re-seeding other worlds as this AI clone states. Here is the ultimate expression of the cycling of life throughout the universe. There will always be new worlds, new beginnings, new Edens without the forbidden tree of life.

This collection of speculative poems takes you beyond the usual boundaries of line and verse, word and image. You are transported, spinning in vertigo as you read and you will want to come back time and again to these pages to experience over and over these voyages of the unpredictable.

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David Fraser lives in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island. He is the founder and editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine, www.ascentaspirations.ca, since 1997. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in 40 journals including Three Candles, Regina Weese, Ardent, and Ygdrasil. He has published a collection of his poetry, Going to the Well (2004), a collection of short fiction, The Dark Side of the Billboard (2006)and edited and published Ascent Aspirations Magazine Anthology One(Dec. 2005) and Anthology Two Windfire (Summer 2006).

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David Fraser has a BA in English from University of Toronto, and an MEd in adult education from OISE. In Ontario he taught English, Creative Writing Writer's Craft among other subjects at the secondary school level for 30 years. He was the ski school director for High Park Snow School for 8 years. Currently he is a full time writer who also teaches skiing at Mt Washington in the winter.

Email: David Fraser

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