ABSENCES ~ A SEQUENCE

The Esthetic Apostle, a new monthly literary journal out of Chicago, edited by my son Samuel, whose aesthetic discernment is reflected in his dedication to showcasing beautiful prose, poetry, artwork, and photography, has just published my poem sequence Absences. The chapbook is available from Amazon ... Here. The artwork is by the wonderful Dutch artist Martine Mooijenkind, alias, Knutseltroep, from Gouda, The Netherlands. The dialogue between between art and the written word is itself one of the subliminal marvels of this collection, and Samuel was most judicious in selecting this particular pairing. He has truly given both works a new breath of life and has infused each with the unsayable essence of their own peculiar aesthetic.

He selected this precis to describe Absences:

Absences addresses the themes of loss of youth, loss of innocence, isolation, separation, exile, death, the absence of familiarity, affection, and above all the loss or absence of love. The sequence meditates on the natural world but finds little comfort there. There are no idyllic, romantic refuges from the self, and pathetic fallacies remain just that: instead of providing a balm to the sick heart, the dales of Arcady merely accentuate its angst. The poems find fitting motifs in poetic echoes and these are channeled into the poems' movement to harmonize their rhythms and oscillations and to achieve a kind of unsettling but restorative equipoise. The sequence resonates with allusions to classical mythology, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Franz Kafka, Johann Georg Hamann, Paul Celan, and Bruno Schulz, and tries to weave its patchwork aesthetic by drawing on their disparate but unified themes. Ultimately, the sequence is a celebration of life, even if life's great peroration is death, and even if we all die the same death over and over again.

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