Catafalques

by Eric Basso

Haunted by a sense of loss and foreboding, this fourth collection is rich in poems that raise the quiet mutiny against a withering cosmos. A dark magic works here, sustained by poetry that is often complex, ironic, disquieting, impassioned, and sometimes even wildly comic. In these pages we are confronted with the poet in midair, the Walrus Voluptuary, a tree that becomes a woman, a man with the head of a black swan. The poet's resonant voice convokes a cycle of spellbinding images, both concrete and elusive, that are, indeed, flares burning in the counterfeit night.

182 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 2005

About the author

Eric Basso was born in Baltimore in 1947. His work has appeared in Asylum Annual, Bakunin, Central Park, Chicago Review, Collages & Bricolages, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, and many other publications. His novel, Bartholomew Fair, is available from Asylum Arts. He is the author of twenty-one plays. His critically acclaimed drama trilogy, The Golem Triptych; the complete short plays, Enigmas; his play The Sabbatier Effect; a book of short fiction, The Beak Doctor; and five collections of poetry, Accidental Monsters, The Catwalk Watch, The Smoking Mirror, Catafalques, and Ghost Light, are available from Asylum Arts, along with Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature 1973-1989 and Revagations: 1966-1974, the first volume of a book of dreams. Basso's most recent previous collection of poems, Earthworks, was published by Six Gallery Press in 2008.

Reviews

[SARDON · Rating 5 out of 5]

As compared to Catwalk Watch, this later collection shows the breadth of Basso's poetic personality in greater detail. Here, the poet retains the crepuscular atmosphere always prevailing over his work, but now engages the reader more with a sense of playfulness in both a conceptual and linguistic sense. Yes, you'll find wondrously strange and exquisitely poetic vignettes of a dying old man's dreams; a hand that terrorizes a city; an aerial poet who practices a truly revelatory form of voyeurism; a neighbor's apartment spontaneously stripped to its barren base and occupied only by a roost full of owls; a mute whose breath inflates the silence of the universe.

But outside these more familiar directions of Basso's imagination, you'll also find very clever and incisive pieces (words I wouldn't have used to describe anything found in Catwalk Watch). "Bestiaries" begins with the indelible lines, "because no one knows how/to write a poem anymore," and goes on to describe how these hapless poets now must maintain caged exotic animals which embody the muted ferocity of their creative impulses. Another very memorable piece, "Metaphysics," contains some clever wordplay--"the Cartesian duelist draws his saber/holds its cold blade to your throat"--and triumphs the unbound joys of synesthetic imagination over the rigid limits of reason.

Catafalques is a very significant collection, because it shows how Basso maintains his dark, sleek style and signature outré imagery while also broadening the accessibility of his work. Although the poems of previous collections tended to grow indistinct over extended readings, Basso infuses these still dazzlingly strange works with an unexpected cleverness that never detracts from the seductive mysteries contained within each poem. Highly recommended to lovers of the wondrous and the strange in poetry.