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Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems 1971-2012

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Considered one of the leading genre/speculative poets for more than a quarter-century, Bruce Boston has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov’s Readers Award, the Rhysling Award, and the first Grandmaster Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Dark Roads collects the best of his long dark poems from more than forty years of publishing. Strikingly illustrated by acclaimed artist M. Wayne Miller, these poems range from direct narratives to surreal explorations of time, memory, obsession and transformation. Includes two Rhysling Winners and three Rhysling Finalists.

156 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2013

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About the author

Bruce Boston

356 books118 followers
I've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/

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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Profile Image for Charles.
Author 41 books296 followers
August 15, 2013
Bruce Boston. Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems, 1971-2012. Colusa, CA: Dark Renaissance Books. 2013.156 pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-937128-90-6. Illustrated by M. Wayne Miller.

Bruce Boston has been writing for many years but I only discovered him about fifteen years ago when I joined the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I was immediately struck by Boston’s ability to evoke images I’d never experience before, and by his immense vocabulary and a talent for wielding words with the delicacy of an épée. Since that time I’ve eagerly awaited every new poem he’s released. I’d have no idea of the count of individual poems that Boston has published, but there are more than forty collections of his work. He has certainly been productive.

Recently, Dark Renaissance Books released a selected collection of many of Boston’s best “long” poems published between 1971 and 2012. I’m not sure exactly how they define long poems but all the ones here are at least two pages of material. Most are quite a bit more. Some are certainly epic in length as well as scope.

As a result of this being a “selected” collection, I’ve previously read many of these poems. I believe this actually increased my enjoyment of them. Boston’s poetry is so rich that I’ve often found myself rereading his work anyway. The first time through I’m swept up by the imagery, which is always perfect but seldom what you expect, and by the joy of the word play. The second time I read for meaning, and though I’m not always able to extract a coherent meaning, I’m always left with a sense of ‘resonance,’ a sense that truth lies within if I but had the breadth of experience to grasp it.

It’s hard to pick favorites from such a collection, where every page holds gems, but I have to call out two particular poems, the multiple award winning “Pavane for a Cyber-Princess,” and “She Was There for Him the Last Time.” Here’s a fragment from “Last Time.”

she was there for him the last time
in the bombed-out city
where the decimating trajectories
left their scars upon the earth
like sabers crossed and waiting

I highly recommend any and all of Boston’s work. You can pick Dark Roads up from the publisher: http://www.darkregions.com/books/dark...

You should certainly check out Boston’s website, where you can access some of his work online:
www.bruceboston.com

I’ll end with a quote from another poem in Dark Roads, “In the Short Seasons of a Long Year without You.”

This sheet of broken lines
I leave for you to find.
Profile Image for Ann Schwader.
Author 87 books113 followers
December 1, 2013
This is an essential collection for readers & collectors of speculative poetry. It offers a varied selection of Rhysling Grandmaster Bruce Boston's longer dark poems (1971-2012), in chronological order. Several works from his ongoing Mutant Rain Forest series are included, along with works ranging from straight-ahead SF narrative to experimental/surreal visions. The book's trade paperback format is carefully designed, with a few elegant black & white illos by M. Wayne Miller.

My personal favorites in this generously-sized collection (over 150 pp.) were the heartbreakingly lovely "She Was There for Him the Last Time," "Pavane for a Cyber-Princess," "Dark Rains Here and There," and all the Mutant Rain Forest works. I have never quite managed to get my head around the surreal, though Boston's version of it makes some incredible mind-pictures.

Boston's language is both kaleidoscopic & precise, and his narratives take the imagination places reality simply doesn't allow for. The works in this collection reward multiple readings -- as all good poetry does.

Profile Image for G.O. Clark.
Author 76 books12 followers
August 25, 2013
Five stars for speculative poetry's most consistently original and masterly poet. Boston sets the standard for all other speculative poets to follow. A selected short poems collection is long overdue.
Profile Image for Arnstein.
245 reviews8 followers
August 5, 2018
A collection of Rhysling-Award-long-poem-length poetry (i.e. 50 lines ≤); roads as opposed to mere alleys, darkness because of the unknown’s allure.

The first, and earliest, poem long enough and deemed important enough to be included in the compilation is ‘The Tiger Does Not Know,’ which in turn introduces itself thus:

He left the cities behind.
He trudged into the wilderness
seeking the god whose words
are weaved in wood, his backpack
like a steely carapace
shielding him from the sun.
(p. 9)

Dedication is synonymous to religion is synonymous to dedication, certainly that must be the case; seeking a god is a dedication, it is aspiration and relentlessness – this is a loudspeaker’s description, true enough, but a silver bell could never appropriately provide an idea of the mass and gravity of the enterprise. Of course, as the poem hints, the search names and clothes the deity, gives it soul and purpose; in this case the deity is a wordmonger and is sought by both protagonist and author, the difference between the two seekers being that the author realizes that words are representations of associations, ideas constituted from the impressions of the most salient features belonging to the objects and concepts in question. As for reality: “The tiger does not know that it is tiger named” (p. 11), and thus the deity is a construct; the only reality is the search itself, the only value is the search, it is the only result which means that the results are not endpoints, and the end of the inquiry must surely be when dedication arbitrarily falters. The search that is Dark Roads spans forty-two years of careful workmanship, and it stands as a representative for itself and all that did not fit within it, both spatially and conceptually – and it is with this in mind that a true description can be presented and understood: This book is absolute proof of dedication.

The chronological span of the contents does by itself force a certain internal variation, time being of course the perception of progression, i.e. change; but then Dark Roads was never intended to be more than a best-of collection of the author’s darker works – ‘darkness’ of course being a word that is brachially affluent with associations, a triple-centennial oak in its own right – and so this collection is obviously not primarily a thematic one. What it is is ‘eclectic,’ both in assembly and style – I sought another wordmonger, one not currently on the run; I was searching for a term with which to describe a shopping trolley which could travel not only in supermarkets of all sizes but traverse specialist shops as well, and thus I was offered that word: ‘eclectic’; the label attached read “selecting a mixture of what appears to be best of various doctrines, methods, or styles” (from entry on Wiktionary), and there was never any doubt that this was the word I needed. In Dark Roads the most premium speculative poetry coexist with more earthbound ones, all of whom consists of the choicest bits of reality and of realms that are not, where each poem’s relation to genres and stereotypes is as hunger relates to tapas and its ability to sate through a micromanagement of options – ‘eclectic’ – and there is always this preoccupation with words: whether this is dealt with directly or we readers sense the underlying perfected craft through its expression, it is ever-present. A valid question presents itself – does this eclecticism arise from this preoccupation? Is this it, that the search for the lógia which with atomic-clock precision yields the right sentiment and intonation, is why the author requires not just the view from a window but the entire horizon?

One of the oddities, if any such thing can be said to exist within an eclectic gathering, is the final poem of the collection: ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at and through Hashish.’ It is the sole occurrence of novelty, the rest of them have seen ink before and are maids no more; its thirteen constituent poems cover twenty-one pages and thereby names itself regent, the longest of the long. Thirteen voices presents thirteen views surrounding hash and its consumption: A connoisseur of art approaches the topic by analysing

Women Smoking Hashish, 1887,
by Italian Pointillist/Symbolist
Gaetano Previati, 1852 – 1920,
(p. 134)

and continues with a crushing judgement:

is a drab and moralistic
interior landscape,
executed in shades
of dull brown
grained and splashed
by pale yellow,
a bit like the shade
of fine Moroccan hash.
(p. 134)

This voice ends its rant with:

In all of this
depressing tableau,
there is no hint
of the colors
that obsess their minds,
nor the visions
that now consume
their lives.
(p. 135)

And it has thus made its opinion clear, if one is to view hashish through the medium of art then robbing it of colour is to rob it of its essence. This is followed by the voice of a seeker of intense experiences, whose excessively exited utterings border on being ramblings, its speech too rushed to allow punctuation, and thus clearly belongs to a persona which is very different from the clear-minded and eloquent voice of the first.

and then it starts
hits you all at once
like a brush fire
takes the lid off
the top of your head
like some Crumb cartoon
and you are eight miles high
and all kinds of things
coming rushing in
(pp. 137-138)

The breathless second voice is followed by a third, the soaring one in its devil-may-care state of happiness, and a fourth, named simply ‘The Victim,’ who is

Assaulted by chords
Of apocalyptic thunder
Gliding forth from
The deepest pits
Of some Stygian hell,
(p. 139)

and whose experience is presented with a capitalized first letter in every line, even when those lines begin mid-sentence, to make sure the text is inflated by a majestic intonation in order to accurately reproduce the voice’s world-scorching inner life. There are still nine more voices that is going to have their say before the poem is done, including a chemist and a historian, a gourmand, even a hashshashin’s brief regrets, each of them hand tailored in accordance to their message, some even changing underway as their aspects go from one frame of mind to another; ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at and through Hashish’ thus lives up to the promise held within its name, as much by manipulating its form as from finding the right entries in the wordmonger’s stock.

To drive down a road at night-time is to traverse a largely imaginary landscape: The headlights illuminate only barely compared to what darkness still remains, and then what is seen is largely shadows, impressions of reality whose images have less to do with what is real than what is construed in the mind. An ideal realm for speculative literature – while Socrates argued that shadows is the lesser reality than that which is known and confirmed by the light, the speculative writer would claim it is the greater for it is the only of the two which is truly and fundamentally malleable; a piece of wood can be split, carved, and polished, but the mind can turn its shadow to iron or bone, perhaps animate it, or entirely rob it of its physicality – and it is such a realm of projections, and the even more speculative darkness beyond, which we are allowed to partake in with Dark Roads. The sculpted absence of light dances and thus stories are told, of a vengeant mutated rainforest that threatens to consume the southern American continent, of Lucifer’s elemental companion and sidekick, of the last existentialist and that which relates to his shallow existence, of a most delicately worked cyborg consort, of a homesick sailor of dark space who grew too old to sail, of an odd fruit, of dining in the most exclusive yet unsatiating place, of a muse simultaneously of deeds and undoing, and, of course, of an aforementioned merchant ”who sold […] words aplenty, […] peddled shades of meaning” (p. 60), but was yet never able to satisfy the unending cravings of those who quest for ever more nuanced ways to express their mind. Truly, within lightlessness we can find infinitely more than can be eyed when things are well-lit.

The tales amount to a total of thirty-one, unless one is able to find one of the thirteen copies of the hardcover edition which has eight additional ones. As noted previously, except for one poem they can all be found in previous releases (this includes those only included in the hardcover), but to get hold of the thirty or so minor collections and chapbooks that are required to replicate this minor tome is quite difficult due to the rarity of many of them, not to mention that such an endeavour would probably not be a very cheap one. Dark Roads is, in other words, a very welcome amassing of parts of the author’s massive backlog. I did earlier define it as a proof of dedication, but it is also true of the deity which is sought that it elevates its seekers, and a wordmonger who has sold all to a buyer has thus created a new wordmonger, it is the case of the ever increasing tower of giants lending their shoulders to new giants; this is such a shoulder, such a wordmonger, such a deity, and is therefore not just a manifestation of dedication, but an aspiration for seekers to come.
Profile Image for Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone.
89 reviews3 followers
September 10, 2013
Dark Roads is a collection of poetry spanning Bruce Boston’s long and illustrious writing career. Previously published, many appeared in magazines and limited-edition publications that have been long unavailable. They have been gathered in one collection and give readers an amazing peak into the depth and power of Boston’s writing.

The collection opens with “The Tiger Does Not Know.” First published in 1971, it’s a haunting work exploring the journey of the soul. One is seeking answers in dreams, metaphors, and images, but there are none to be found. The man keeps seeking, but his search is in vain. The closing line, “The tiger does not know that it is tiger named” is a powerful statement on the futility of Man to define, trap, and confine dreams. Boston often uses nature as a metaphor for the darkness within the human species. “Three Evocations of the Mutant Rain Forest” from 1989 is a disturbing foreshadowing to the nightmare of climate change we now face. Boston parallels the decay of nature to the decay of the human soul, this creating a terrifying dual descent into darkness.

His work is fierce, ferocious, haunting, poignant, and emotive. There is hope, despair, anger, and fear, often all contained within the same line. In one moment he can make you soar and then tear the wind from your wings in agony. It’s what poetry is meant to be.

Highly recommended.

Originally published at Horror Novel Reviews
Profile Image for Rena Mason.
Author 44 books51 followers
August 13, 2013
DARK ROADS is an awesome collection of long poems. I favor dark science fiction in general, which is probably one of the reasons I fell so in love with these works. "A Stardrifter Grounded" actually made my eyes well up. "The Wordmonger's Tale" and "The Star Dreamers" are two other favorites among so many wonderful, thought-provoking poems. The years the pieces were written are under the title and as I read through the poems, they made me wonder what the poet/author's life was like during those years. I highly recommend this collection. You won't be disappointed.
Profile Image for Gothic Readers Book Club.
29 reviews10 followers
September 12, 2013
GOTHIC READERS BOOK CLUB CHOICE AWARD WINNER

This collection from Bruce Boston spans his entire career, and the selections are amazing for their depth and diversity. This is not cheap horror poetry about monsters and the apocalypse. Boston's vivid imagery and elegant style captures the long, dark shadows of twilight and the haunting fear of midnight. Decay, terror, fear, hope, the light at the end of the tunnel, madness, nightmares, and dreams. Bruce Boston is the Byron of our age.

If You Like: Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge

http://gothicreadersbookclub.blogspot...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews