| Journey to Kailash | ||||||||
| Mike Allen | ||||||||
| Norilana Books, 125 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Amal El-Mohtar
Reader, it's brilliant.
Journey to Kailash is a handsomely designed book that brings together the very best of Mike Allen's poetry,
collecting almost fifty speculative poems published over the last ten years in a variety of venues, several of which
have been nominated for or have won the Rhysling Award. In addition to the quality of the material, Allen puts
his well-deserved reputation as a fantastic editor of the fantastic to work here, organizing these sometimes
very disparate pieces into a coherent whole, worthy of the term oeuvre.
The collection is broken up into three different groups, headed by lines taken from the first and last poem within
each section. It took me a couple of readings to realise that; I was at first caught up with how the headings seemed
to tell a story, hint at some thread of meaning carried through the whole. Brought together, they make a sort of
poem in themselves: misfortune when he leaves; his shadows grow to meet her -- as the stars die, sad whispers
warm the breeze -- staring down the sun: the end he never sees. This is certainly a collection of layers and
depths, of subtleties tucked into the corners of seemingly straightforward meanings.
On the surface of it, this is a collection of nightmares. Mike Allen is a Tarot-deck Devil, and the most
effective of these pieces partake of the dark. Consider the following lines at the end
of "The Disturbing Muses," the titular poem of one of Allen's previous collections, inspired by a
series of paintings:
Other poems take a lighter approach to the dark: "retrovirus" and "Disaster at the Brainbank™ ATM" lack the
elegance and evocative beauty of "The Distubing Muses," and represent the type of poem that I don't particularly
enjoy on its own, but appreciate the necessity of in a full-length collection; they can't all be deep and mythic,
after all, can't all be introspections on an epic scale. There's a black humour to many of these intermezzo-ish
pieces, an ease of reading that leaves one smirking at the cleverness or rolling eyes at the gut-wrenching
pun, which is sometimes welcome after having been terrified by a nightmarish image of someone holding a knife
to your memories ("The Captive Pleads with the Memory Carver"), or the inexorable tug towards the pale face
at the dark window ("No One"), just beyond the blinds. By and large, poems like "The End of the Affair," in
which a man and woman attempt to ever-so-subtly kill each other by such varied methods as a "wormhole to the
planet of razor-demons" and "limb-devouring sludgemolds" -- leave me amused, but ultimately unmoved. Still,
they adequately serve the purpose of seasoning the dark, dark meat of the collection.
My favourite poems, however, are those that engage with myth in distinctly Allen-esque ways. "The Journey to
Kailash," the poem that opens the collection, is a masterful piece in which an American teenage boy considers
the relative strangeness of having the Hindu god Ganesh as a step-father. "Bacchanal" places the Roman god of
wine and revelry at the heart of a heroin party; the triptych of "Midnight Rendezvous" poems -- one in
Boston, one in Philly, one in Eden -- are nothing short of amazing, featuring satyrs liaising with Horned Gods
in bathroom stalls, mermaids taking wayward men back to, ahem, their place, and the disbelieving rejection
of would-be clockwork lovers.
We use "nightmare" as synonymous with unpleasant, nowadays -- the nightmare roommate, the board meeting that
was a nightmare, the nightmare exam from hell. But dwell on it a moment, break it down into night and mare,
into darkness shaped for riding into the strange, the incomprehensible, the unknown. That land we fear to
visit in our sleep is where Mike Allen lives full time, twisting the dark to his purpose. The poems in this
collection are as terrifying as they are wonderful, and I highly recommend the reading of them.
Amal has a history of reading anything with pages. Now, she reads stuff online, too. She sometimes does other things, but that's mainly it. |
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