GotPoetry.com > > Review of Double Visions, a collection of poems by Bruce Boston & friends

GotPoetry?

Events

News

Poems

Poetry Venues

Submit News

Inside

Downloads

Exquisite Corpse

Games

Got Pictures?

Movies

Page Slam

Radio

Community

Blogs

Clubs

Staff List

Subscriptions

Supporters

Forums

Poetry Workshops

Marketplace

Book Store

Clothing

Karma

Product

Reference

Encyclopedia

Links

Rhyming Dictionary

Searches

Top 10

Wiki

Communication

Help Desk

User Info

Welcome Anonymous

Membership:

Latest: xxkaitvxx

New Today: 2

New Yesterday: 4

Overall: 10941

People Online:

Members: 10

Visitors: 219

Bots: 3

Staff: 2

Staff Online:
01: fogglethorpe
02: mamta

Paid Membership

Buy a paid membership and get more out of GotPoetry!

Advertise on the GotPoetry Advertising Network.

Get Published

Submit your poems, events and poetry news. No registration required.

Review of Double Visions, a collection of poems by Bruce Boston & friends

Double Visions by Bruce Boston with fellow poets
2009, Dark Regions Press, ISBN 1-88893-66-9
66 pages - $7.95 paperback

Bruce Boston’s latest volume of poetry from ‘Dark Regions Press’ Double Visions is a beautifully haunting, enchantingly soul-stirring collection of twenty-one collaborative inspirations that feed the head while whispering vast and secret wonders to the heart. Here literary master Bruce Boston teams up with ten of today’s foremost speculative poets to create a fantastical array of fully realized, oft times frightening, mindscapes brimming with mythic splendor and bizarre horrors alike. On the whole these are acutely insightful works that display an intimate understanding of spiritual longing, loneliness, and the human condition at large – they are deeply layered with meanings less tangible that speak to the reader on a variety of subtle levels.

Most of the poems in Double Visions made there debut during the late 80s, 90s and early part of this decade, appearing in top speculative publications such as Amazing Stories, Strange Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares as well as over half a dozen Rhysling Award Anthologies. Three appear in print here for the first time, including a stylishly ghoulish seasonal poem entitled Carnival of Ghosts with Marge Simon (who also contributes a work of art) that captures the “spirit” of Halloween most aptly. It tells the woeful tale of an annual All Hallows Eve haunting of regretful, reminiscent souls.

“Our harsh laughter
spills into the alley
along with dusk.

Regret hangs like fog
above the raucous sounds:
a rush of sins
without redemption
from memory’s grave.”

Many of the poems in Double Visions are profoundly psychological in nature, some being deeply introverted. To Dance With Shiva, with David Hunter Sutherland, is an intense, robustly visual piece that forecasts what benefits the future of virtual reality could hold for us in the field of psychotherapy if the technology were to be developed as a constructive therapeutic tool. The Web, with Gary William Crawford, is a brief, savagely brooding work of gothic free-verse that intimately explores the horrors of mental illness. It describes being systematically destroyed by ones own personal demons: monsters born of, and perpetuated by, the illness. The Web is one of three works with Mr. Crawford that appear in this volume. All take place in the mythical “Shadow City”, an ebon metropolis of surreal nightmare where madness is the order of the day and shame has become an art form.

Within these pages you will also explore a dangerous primordial terrain of lunatic mysteries through a trio of gorgeously lurid works on the fictional “Mutant Rain Forest” with fellow Grand Master Award recipient Robert Frazier. Included in this set is the mesmerizing masterwork Return to the Mutant Rain Forest, which won the Odyssey Poetry Award in 1988 along with several other well deserved accolades. In addition, you will behold a blasted post-holocaustic nuclear landscape of ultra-vivid cybernetic horror in an unapologetically bleak future vision word-picture entitled Holocaustic Museum Fragments for Binary Extrapolation, with t. winter-damon. Also with the same poet, We Find Ourselves on Mars gazing sunward at a dead world we once called home.

However dark and grim Double Visions may at times appear, it is not without a sense of macabre humor and irony.

Consider Unextinctions, with Roger Dutcher, where nature plays a mirthful jape on humanity. Here long extinct species begin reappearing around the globe in mass to create all variety of mayhem.

“The tabloids have a field day,
a chance to report the truth…”

Shortly after this, man’s ancient ancestors start showing up in numbers way too large to control.

“Hirsute and filthy,
clad only in uncured skins,
they wander down from the hills
or in across the prairies
to prowl our neighborhoods,
to invade our finest malls
and shatter our plate glass,
to crouch upon our fenders
and fiercely pummel our hoods.”

Double Visions takes a decidedly zany turn at Shades and Illuminations, with G. O. Clark. This is a singularly quirky poem with an uncanny wit that explores the mysteries of the light bulb and lamp shade. Each separate verse offers a different parable or truism which features the aforementioned objects predominantly in its oratory. The poem teaches us (along with several other odd and dubious facts) that…

“Commandants of the Third Rich
Fashioned lampshades from cured human
Skins, imparting a warm and fleshly
Glow to their reading pleasures.”

All in all Double Visions is a spell binding collection of masterfully articulated horrors and wonders: wise, profound, and mind-expanding. It is well worth getting to know.

From Star Line, Sept/Oct 2009 issue. Review by Noizy1

Submitted by Noizy1 on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 (16:53:24) (567 reads)

"Review: Review of Double Visions, a collection of poems by Bruce Boston & friends" | Login/Create an Account | 0 comments

The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.