The Gravedigger, a novel by Ilan Herman. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander for Crow Reviews. This is Herman’s debut novel from Casperian Books, released this Spring.

Sometimes he thought that all life was wasted. That was the nature of life- to be wasted. No bending words could change that.   -The Gravedigger

Ilan Herman admits that questions about mortality and purpose remain unanswered, despite our best efforts to confront them. Perhaps there is something in us that wants to keep trying, perhaps a stubborn tendency that makes us unwilling to let these questions go despite the obvious fact that we seem to come up empty. For some it is not a matter of pursuing purpose, but pursuing faith, choosing to have faith or being moved to simply accept or believe things even in the face of those questions.

Sometimes a writer does not presume to give us answers, but has come to understand that the processing and confrontation sets a wheel in motion in our own minds to chase our own struggles. I think that, above all, is what Herman wants us to come away with after reading The Gravedigger- that sense of being stirred to think. Why do we live?

Starting off with Noah and Adam, Herman establishes these characters and illuminates tendencies in their thinking about people and the particular vocation of preparing graves. We suspect right away that there are some deliberate choices among Herman’s details whose symbolism come to light later on and whose placement set the stage for the story’s elements. In the initial exchanges between the men, we see their regard for life and “purpose” manifest, begin to understand the connection to the act of digging a grave. Does the gravedigger traverse life and death, “the void”  (p.27) or ferry the living back to the resting place of earth, nature?

Does the gravedigger bring closure to living?  In digging, does he carve places in the world for people to inhabit, places of significance, something permanent?

The men are even carving in the cabin, carving potatoes, rendering them. The masks that are removed later are nameless people, given shape.

We live for thousands of days until, one day, none remain…

I won’t spoil the story, but it gets interesting during a visit to one of the  mausoleums (tomb), where Adam is forced to rethink many things that he had considered settled in himself. Herman describes these kinds of pivotal moments: when we learn terrible news, when something tragic happens. What happens to Adam is just as rattling and furthermore- old wounds are opened.

The Gravedigger takes the reader to unexpected places, and challenges our habits: just when you think you know what Herman is setting up, you find you guessed wrong. And if you think that this is a novel that will wrap itself up neatly in a formulaic package, you’d be wrong again.

We are taken on this journey of characters, each struggling not only with life’s purpose and sense, but with the relative morality of their actions. We see similar questions considered by strikingly different people. Herman contrasts evil with innocence, seemingly deserved tragedies against unthinkable loss that seems cruel in its randomness.

The Gravedigger ultimately struggles with what people, irrespective of eon, age, geography, or circumstances struggle with: What happens when we die?

What happens to the living? How much of what we believe comes from our desire to feel comfort about loved ones lost, or ourselves and our mortality?

This is a remarkable first novel, from an author who joins complicated concepts with accessible storytelling to produce something that both engages and moves us.

The Gravedigger is available from Casperian Books, www.casperianbooks.com

When the Cats Razzed the Chickens by Mel Bosworth, Folded Word Press. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.

“I saw his face grow into his eyes, those big lake blue eyes…”
There are the boys talking about physics, in a bathtub debate, and would-be celebrities spooning in their hut after a street show gone awry. I was glad to see one of his well known and deservedly praised pieces “Leave Me As I Lessen”:
“The children call me Melting Man. I hate pictures, but smile anyway, teeth dripping down my throat. Mom screams when my ears fall off and ooze like slugs to the ocean. My watery toes give dawdling chase.”

Cynthia Reeser has an excellent, thorough review of “Razzed” at Prick Of The Spindle, and you can check that out here. You can also peek in at Mel here, at his blog.

Check out Folded Word here.

When the Cats Razzed the Chickens  by Mel Bosworth

ISBN: 978-0-9778167-2-9

Folded Word Signature Series, 2009

BlazeVOX (Books) (www.blazevox.org) ; 2009 – 96 pages

I think I’m writing this review in reverse, but the almost too brilliant Angles of Disorder by Zachary Bush is a deconstructive whirlwind around the wheel of life, which when it ends, kind of pulls the whole thread together with a poem entitled “The Hard Truths About Living and Dying,” particularly the last line:

“When you die there is no breath, and your life’s true purpose is finally realized. There is absolutely no meaning, and there is a great disappointment that can never be eradicated.”

Perhaps not so hopeful, but what did you expect from a book whose sections are marked off by a stick figure, ostensibly “the poet” who comes apart piece by piece throughout the manuscript and what’s left afterward, the head (or perhaps even “the intellect”) itself slips off the page until there is nothing left.

What precedes that final line is a Smorgasbord of modernism, put on display by Bush and then reflected through his own prism meditating on the impossible contradiction of poetic existence, that is, a dissonance (disorder) permeating all functioning dichotomies (angles.) They’re all here disguised in Bush’s peculiar yet resonant rhetoric…exquisite corpse (“From Within The Vortex”, invoked in “The Difference”) concrete poetry (When You Are Dead) absurdist archetypes (“The Goldfish”) dream journaling and yes, even some very clever and playful LangPo:

“Overweight Water Queen, sobbing top 50 Doo-Wop Hits. Sketching the differences in U.S. Stop Signs. An American Flag waxed in yellow wax hangs still-to-still life. The flag hangs 8 ½ feet above a village of matchstick castles, unable to melt because of the confused conversion. That, most likely, was just another Blackout contortion. See: no breeze, no sound & nothing near to sestina humidity. Yet something is sweating. Wax sings: drooping, dropping, releasing & splattering onto the sand. The sand, that resembles volcanic ash, covers the ground. Aquarius has gone tonight. ‘A’is as realized now. I see the all-consuming Frequency (trying like a bastard) to consume me…constantly dreaming in circles.”

-from “From the center of The Circle”

The themes of “Hunger,” “Time” and “Energy” get their own sections, as these characteristics, personified, archetyped or otherwise, drive Bush’ deconstructionist spiral.  In the end, there is only the void or the sense of the abysmal, personified and manifest in Angles’ final section, by poems entitled “While You Sleep In The City,” Before the Spinning Color Wheel Becomes our Primary Source of Energy,” and “The Last Three Days of Your Final Starvation.”  “The Disappearing Act” in this section is among the darkest and most chilling in the whole collection:

“This boy’s mother once threw a pot of boiling water at his head when she caught him down in the basement, loving on the hunting dogs. This boy said nothing when the bigger boys shoved a branch inside of him. This boy was found in the woods by his father with the end of a branch planted deep inside of his ass.

This boy, when no one was watching, would urinate and defecate on the things that were for sale: glass ashtrays, silverware, empty bookshelves, second-hand sofas, and manual typewriters. This boy’s father laughed at him, when he found him in the woods, and called him a Patsy.

This boy made sure his mother and father were deep asleep before he took off all of his clothes, walked out the back screen-door, and followed the moonlight to the middle of the lake…”

Bush is at his strongest when he is grinding out his iconic prose analogies. Much of his experimental form here, while well executed, is at times superfluous to the otherwise powerful narrative that actually permeates the entire book with an impending sense of dread.  It is in the prose passages where Bush truly synthesizes a model that is part Buddhist, part Scientific Method, into a genuinely fresh Surrealism. There is the implication that no matter how “efficient” a model for existence is developed by a poet or philosopher or any human for that matter, it’s necessary imperfections lead back to a single, inevitable end.

The ghosts of Ezra Pound and John Keats also haunt this book (“The Vortex & Memory”) as Bush demonstrates in nearly all the pieces here his comfort with Negative Capability and the self-awareness of the poet.  No question Angles of Disorder is a BIG debut in the tradition of poets who are them-selves aware of pushing the form forward.  What’s unusual is finding this combination of talent and awareness in an author who is only twenty-five: not even Gen X but Gen Y.  Many young authors over reach on debut collections, or are too anxious to “flex” their poetic muscles.  Bush has given us plenty of flexing here, but delivers on all the goods.

(for PDF )

(for MP3)

2009, 57 pages

Shudder Pageant is a collaborative multi-media flash novel (as opposed to “micro-novel” – a novel told in 140 character increments) by a couple of young and edgy authors who are probably too good for their own good.

The plot of the story is a spiral, not linear, account of three friends; Jacob, Sophie and Cody, whose lives are irrevocably altered by the enlistment of Cody’s brother Brody into the Army Reserves.  The spiral of events downward (as it turns out) is mirrored in destinations like hospital floors and street gutters before the thread spins out. And it is back along that thread that the pageant of shudders parades.

“The more broken one bucked wild horse on the bed, red foam spurting from his mouth like water from a pinched garden hose.

First nurse leaned back, the leather strap straining damp on her palms.

‘Get the fuck over here and help me!’

Second nurse flicked the cigarette through the window. In the distance, explosions hung in the sky like angry memories. She passed the bed of the less broken one. He’d been awake for 10 hours now but hadn’t spoken a word. The 33 stitches through his lips were thick and sloppy, the result of an overtired and fawning young medic.

He whimpered like a broke-leg pup. Second Nurse frowned deeply.

She knew his time would come, and when it did, she’d be the one holding his hand.”

Xtx and Bosworth have seamlessly woven their interpretations of the three main characters with the perspective of peripheral characters who bear witness to the slow drop out of the primaries; into a story that feels as if it could have been culled from a fevered, attention span challenged Denis Johnson dream.  In just a few minimalist pages, the collaboration draws out violence, crime, drug addiction, broken families and broken loves all stemming from a bleak but familiar landscape:

“At first it was awkward, Brody was different…quieter. But even later, after he acclimated as best he could to his temporary civilian life, he still wasn’t the same. It was a different version of Brody, like someone had taken who he was, washed it several times, and put it back inside him.

His parents put on faces and avoided any discussion about how things were going “over there.”

They never said ‘Iraq.’”

What the collaborating authors have created here is an Ouroboros of narrative structure, a story that essentially gives birth to itself, coming together in the psychic connection between Cody and Brody, whose destinies are irreversibly intertwined and manifest in a two headed mutant which Cody keeps animated (or not) in a jar he keeps cradled close to his bosom and drug habit.

The surreal sense of events spiralling out of control is punctuated by an evolving chorus that runs from “We’re real people doing real things” which runs out to the past tense “I was a real person doing real things,” as if these characters are trying to convince themselves of something that isn’t quite genuine, or even entirely true.

Shudder Pageant is a little online miracle, a multi-medium flash novel in spoken or written form that is absolutely free to everyone, and yet weaves the “NOW” of both evolving literature and the reigning cultural paradigms into a post-modern fable that feels simultaneously unreal and immediate.  Bosworth and xtx demonstrate that they can function as one unwavering and unblinking voice, and one can only hope that they continue to move literature in a direction that is this honest, accessible and revelatory through future collaborations.

The work ranges from introspective questioning in poems like “poem on the night I heard my father will die” and “the journey” to the subconscious tensions that surround a person in grief in poems like “hammering the nails in” and “I know what men are like”.  Interspersed  in between are hints of joy and shadows of anger.  He finds comfort in the paper and pen at a time when nothing one can say will ease the projected burden of death.

Geraint is at his best in “as Thoreau said” and in the very touching poem “the old wardrobe”:

“I thanked you for everything

Not just for what you’d done

Mostly what you hadn’t

Just for being there

I kept checking, as you cooled

And when they came for you

Mum asked for your wedding ring

And I got it for her”

Geraint Hughes’ collection “this is it….” Speaks to the rollercoaster ride that is loss, how in it there are moments of quiet contemplation, sadness, joy, anger, and hope, even if it feels backhanded.  This is a fine chap to place on your nightstand to just remind you of what you have and to be thankful.

 Wayne Mason has been lauded as a working man’s poet and that is clearly defined in this collection of poems published by erbacce-press.  Poet Laureate Of A Dirty Garage is equal parts blue collar factory man, lone writer, and side-car Buddhist.

He is at his best in the poems “Defeated On Monday Morning”, “Poet Laureate of My Garage”, “Martyrs”, and “Swing Your Pen Like A Hammer And Sickle”.  Wayne understands the essence of the common man and how hard it is to find glimmers of hope amongst the day to day plodding movements of punching the clock.  He explores the idea that his words can chip away at this monotony, but that they might not save any lives from the factory….except his own.

Wayne grazes over images of Buddha in this collection, but does not dig very deep though his fascination is noted.  The recurrent mention of Buddha speaks to “what if” there is something more than this continuous factory life that maybe something exists beyond the things that might make life so hard.

My favorite poem in this 18 poem collection is “Dreaming of Han Shan”.

“I was only 16

when I read the

cold mountain

poems of

Han Shan and

the simplicity

like Chinese

brush strokes

on rice paper

kicked me

in the gut

and more

than ever I

saw the truth”

This collection speaks for the factory worker and begins to stretch its arms out to new age ideas.  This chap by Wayne Mason can be purchased from erbacce-press by going to: www.erbacce-press.com for more details.

What have we become? If observing the industrial minicosm of Bill Shute’s Acres can tell us anything, it’s that we are increasingly a society as he concludes: without ideas, only things.

And so he takes us through a setting of things: buildings with their smoky windows, paradoxical images, elements of nature and industry where natural stones have been unnaturally chiseled into angular structures of utility. Three old oaks are contained in this development, as though their natural context could be chiseled and contrived as well, in a median surrounded by pavement.

Steel poles with their boxy light fixtures (again, angular) challenge the claims of the old oaks, rivals in the vertical spaces. They are as towers contrived not by the needs of nature and biology, but rising from the plans of civilization.

In these acres, the landscape is reconfigured, and ironically the speaker is observing a space where what is natural is out of place: walking instead of driving? Only if there’s a compelling reason. Nature itself is reduced to a design element. Is he such an element? Where does he fit in?

This book is a short read, it aims to present a series of observations but trusts the reader’s ability to draw conclusions without overtly preaching or doling out judgment with a heavy pen. We can infer certain things, particularly about social stratification and this idea of “other” that is explored in both the natural versus industrial comparison, and in the physical barriers. Shute’s acres are stratified: gated communities, neighborhoods and buildings that are off limits, pedestrians versus drivers, participants and observers. Perhaps the message hits home here: where food is “eaten by those family members able to make it”.

What is he saying about progress, and the table that is our collective largess, our bounty? The speaker is of the space, but apart from the space, aligned with the outsider, the pedestrian. The speaker is aligned with the oaks in the median, the carved hills, the absent.

“Acres”, Bill Shute. Kendra Steiner Editions, # 131. 2009

This 2007 volume by Bill Shute is a work to revisit. He achieves something very magical in Point Loma Purple, but keeps it accessible: he tells us a story.
In these “mosaic verses”, we find his themes arranged, such that their context changes depending on where the observer stands in relation to the work. Verses, beset by Shute’s purposeful spacing, are as tiles suspended on a grouted plane, where divinity looms perpendicular to an earth observed.

There are many things to love about “Point Loma Purple” found in Shute’s social and spiritual connections, playing out in a “neo-narrative” of Katherine Tingley. (“Neo-narrative”, in that he has essentially recreated her story as an “imagined story”, interpreted,based on the public record)

But why? Why has he chosen her life, her contributions? We know Shute uses language to link domains. From symbols to architecture, he connects humans with their elements (myopic or even absurd, when he’s in a critical mode) and then pushes back, humans falling back into a periphery. He takes the reader from what is individual to what is universal-moving in and then slowly zooming out. It seems fitting that he would choose a subject so connected historically to a movement of spiritual oneness in the face of diverse pluralities. Just as Shute’s “Acres” explores society in the industrial park minicosm, Tingley is an exploration of the individual in relation to everything beyond the fingertips.
We are introduced to Katherine, (then, Catherine) in “A Dream, A Seed” and Shute sets the scene, first highlighting elements of the physical realm: trees, forms, colors, perfume- then connecting them inextricably to an inner mindscape to serve as a place of anchor in upcoming transitions of both chronology and style: from earthly to ethereal, from the ontological to the soulful, human to social, youth to adulthood- for example,returning to the younger Katherine and the Chinese teapot. In these scenes, Shute draws at times from the accounts of Tingley herself, such as in “The Splendor of the Soul”. It is through translation into Shute’s own language and cadence that we, as readers, are treated to a remarkable piece of writing. (continued)

Who was Katherine Tingley? Tingley was a turn of the century theosophist, and like Shute’s tiles of “mosaic verse”, the members of the Theosophical Society advanced a position of collected truths: an assemblage of elements, forward moving and evolving truths from diverse religious perspectives that again, like a mosaic, present an aggregate truth that is universal and overarching. It is, in a sense, a summation of parts, like an organism: one life, in “radical unity”. Truth, “Speaking through every culture.” (“A Dream, A Seed”)

Was it Shute’s intention to “micro-morphize” Tingley as an embodiment of sorts, into this organism, bringing lofty ideas within range, into something palpable?

What we learn about as we read about Tingley goes beyond the idea of reflecting on the self in relation to a higher consciousness or interconnected design, into the idea of working purpose and life examined. “Deliberacy”: breaking “the chain of empty habit”.
We watch her movements from escape to reinvention, actor to activist, becoming a public personality subject to both wrath and admiration. We see suspicion: of a woman, of a rival, of an innovator, of a person whose message was often misunderstood or feared. We see criticism- Point Loma as “bourgeoisie”.

Tingley’s story is about a certain essential imperative, reflected in the examples of charitable and social work:
In “Bridge Building”:

“Not concerned about receiving, practicing the
Law of duty. She didn’t think about trying to achieve
These goals- she was too busy living them…”

“…each man is a Soul; each Soul
Must have chance to evolve; and those who have gone
So far astray are in greatest need of the Light.”

In Book Two: Being and Becoming, we see Tingley’s story connected to these questions of mission and purpose. Enter the Theosophical Society, and soon- her ascent and the spread of “theosophy for the masses.” (“The Woman In The Wilderness”)
By the time Tingley gets to Point Loma, she is clear on the need to connect work with purpose toward “divine life”, mission, service, “casting pebbles in the pool of humanity” (“Punta de la Loma”)
Reaching out and refining the message, she turns her attention to the establishment of the Raja-Yoga School: “the melting together of beauty and education” (“The Raja-Yoga Mustard Seed”) and “The New Way”, a publication intended for inmate populations. (karma, transformation, reincarnation, and transcendence.)
At its core, this book is a tribute to the “Purple Mother”: purple, the color of “royalty” and “womandom”. (“The Path, The Potholes”) It is a tribute to Katherine Tingley’s legacy and Shute makes the case – eloquently and skillfully- for understanding and appreciating this legacy.

* * *

About The Book

Point Loma Purple: The Life And Work Of Katherine Tingley (1847-1929)

An Imagined History In Mosaic Verse

A 3200+ line book-length poem in 18 chapters, paralleling the 18 sections of the Bhagavad-Gita.

Bill Shute, 2007

Published by Word Mechanics

Palm Springs, California

Find more titles by Bill Shute at Kendra Steiner Editions.

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