Brief Encounters with My Third Eye: Selected Short Poems 1975-2016

by Bruce Boston

Over one hundred of Boston’s best short poems (under fifty lines) from more than forty years of publishing, including fifteen award-winning poems.Boston’s poetry has received the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov’s Readers Award, and the Rhysling and Grandmaster Awards of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.“Boston forces us to make eye contact with alchemists, angels, ghosts, werewolves, demagogues, monsters, demons, spacers, robots, berserkers, their lovers, and their victims. Inventive, speculative to the point of skewering us with wonder, innovative, resonant with melody, this overview of Boston's work from the early 70's to the present dramatizes the development of one of America's most skilled and inspired poets.” – Mary Turzillo, Lovers & Killers, Mars Girls, Elgin and Nebula Award Winner“In these fleet, always musical poems, Boston spotlights not only infinite vistas of time and space but also the grottos of our most intransigent longings and fears. These same poems may move us to gasp or guffaw to the point of finding ourselves, to purloin a phrase of the poet's, ‘polymorphously pleasure-spent.’ Brief Encounters twinkles luminously and always delivers.” – Michael Bishop, Nebula Award Winner, author of Other Arms Reach Out to Georgia Stories“With Brief Encounters, Boston manages an amazing he not only knocks it out of the park, but also shows us he's been doing it for decades. A great read for anyone who enjoys seeing what wonders words can work...and who isn't afraid to step into the dark from time to time.” – Michaelbrent Collings, multiple Bram Stoker Award Nominee and bestselling author of The Longest ConProudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing – Tales from the Darkest Depths

Interview with the what makes this collection of selected short poems so special?

Bruce It contains more than a hundred of my best poems under fifty lines collected from more than forty years of publishing, including 14 award-winning poems.Which poem is your favorite and why?

Bruce Hard to pick a single favorite in over 100 poems, but if I have to, I'd go with "For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets."  It was my first Rhysling Award poem and the one that most readers seem to remember.Why should readers give dark poetry book a try?

Bruce Because it is poetry written for and available to any literate reader, not just other poets.

Brief Encounters eBook

US Horror FictionPoetry collectionDark poetry collectionHorror haiku writingHorror SuspensePsychological thrillerFantasyDystopian Science fictionHorror literaturePost apocalyptic science fiction

Genres: Poetry

163 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 4, 2016

About the author

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/

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another knock-out collection from Bruce Boston, one of speculative poetry's finest practitioners. The pieces here span the years 1975 through 2016 but the power is present throughout. Boston started strong and hasn't faltered. Many of these pieces are award winners.

Hard to say what my favorites are here. One is "I Build Engines." "I build engines that fill your boots with scorpions while you sleep."

Another is "Dystopian Dusk," which is frightening in its relevance to the world we live in.

Boston seems particularly adept at transferring ideas into the reader's head, and I always find that those ideas trigger others so that I can use his work as a jumping off place for other stories and poems. In this way, Boston's poetry provides plenty of prompts for ones own work. That's a nice perk for reading his pieces, although you don't need that to simply enjoy.

[Matthew David Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruce Boston sits atop the mountain of speculative poetry. His list of laurels in poetry of the fantastic is almost mythic. He has won the Rhysling Award for speculative poetry a record 7 times, the Asimov's Readers' Award for poetry a record 7 times and a record 4 Bram Stoker Awards in poetry for his collections. He won the first Grandmaster Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1999. He has also received a Pushcart Prize in fiction.

Boston's newest collection of shorter poems, Brief Encounters With My Third Eye, spans my own lifetime: 1975-2016. Yet another testament, that he not only gazes from the mountains of speculation, but constantly walks the trail between the valleys as well. Boston's eyes are well seasoned in the art of the "other." He's been doing it since the seventies. He's been doing it my entire lifetime.

Brief Encounters is arranged by decade, with 6 poems representing the 70's, and much larger helpings from each of the following 4 decades. The poems in brief encounters rage from relatively short to mid-sized poems. The sampling here is large, though Boston's oeuvre is large enough to leave any reader still hungry enough for more with plenty to keep discovering and digging.

The poems range from the surreal, to science fiction, some horror type fantasy, and just pure speculative reaches with out having to be pinned to any category as well. Boston often skirts the line of high art and accessible poetry. He skates it like a figure skater on white paper. His earlier poems may require a dictionary or a regular inquiry into Wikipedia for his obscure references into ancient Gods/esses and science fictions terms and ideas, but the digging is the pay off. When the poems do not require digging you can generally rely on the music to do the digging on you.

On the surface Bruce Boston seem occupied with the un-real escapist non-reality of things, but like all great artist's and their art the main concern is the human concern and how humans play out on the field of metaphor is often where the finding of self occurs.

This is my third foray into a Bruce Boston poetry collection. I recommend him as highly as I would recommend any poet, both living and not.

[Steven Withrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruce Boston is an excellent writer of the long poem, as his Dark Roads collection from 2013 attests, but it is here, in poems of under 50 lines, that his particular talents propel him high above nearly everyone else writing verse in the speculative and weird genres over the past 40 years.

What are those particular talents? Well, there are many, but I will focus on five—one for each decade presented in this uncommonly tight and fine selection of short poems.

First, the six 1970s poems show Boston’s talent for crafting lines and stanzas that seldom devolve into lineated prose. The most audible strategy he uses to shape his poems is his close attention to accentual patterns, syncopated from phrase to phrase. Hear the heavy syllables fall steadily in “Horses of Light”: “In the wake of avid hooves / the sky lies sleek and dark, / the plumping stars mere flecks of stone.”

Second, in evidence as the poet comes into his own in the 1980s is a talent for synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa. This talent, central to Boston’s narrative gift, is partly a feat of compression—of worldbuilding in miniature—and partly a flair for impressionistic rendering. In such brilliant poems as “The Alchemist Takes a Lover in the Infinite Variety of Fire” and “All of the Lady in Sly Concoction,” Boston knows just how much character, plot, and imagery will suffice.

Third is a talent for playing variations on a theme. In the linked “Curse of the [Shapeshifter’s; Angel’s; Time-Traveler’s; Body-Thief’s; SF-Writer’s; Ghost’s; Bandersnatch’s] Wife” poems from the 1990s, Boston, gloriously ambitious symphonist that he is, allows himself the space to reveal the full range of his abilities with no need for an overarching narrative. Each poem stands alone; each contributes to something greater.

Fourth, in the 2000s Boston displays a new talent for plainspoken emotional intimacy. It begins in “Why Your Robot Dog Has Been Recalcitrant” with the shift to the second person, but it jumps to life in the Bradburyesque small poems “Origami Rockets” and “Heavy Weather.” And while there are other strong poems from this century’s first decade, I especially appreciate the ample spareness of those two pieces.

Fifth and finally is Boston’s lifelong talent for surprising, senses-awakening utterance. In this decade, he is capable of “A chalice with propellers. // The myriad cachinnations / of snow monkeys” (from “Surreal Wish List”) as well as “Speed up the video / to see an orchid / burst in full bloom / from its calyx / in only seconds, // or a monarch’s / crumpled wings / burst in sudden / and startling color / from a drab cocoon” (from “Slicing Time”). If that is not an exquisite poetic talent, nothing is.

[Arnstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selections from four decades and a year’s worth of short poetry (< 50 lines), most belonging to one of the underlying taxa of speculative fiction.

‘The third eye’ is a term often used to signify one of the chakras connected to certain kinds of meditation, but it is important to note that this book does not utilize this term for that purpose. Observe the image fronting this collection: The face does indeed have three eyes, the third of which is seems to be situated between the frontal eminences, but this reviewer would argue that this eye does not protrude through the layers of skin and bone, residing purely within the mind itself. Importantly, the other two eyes are closed as if to prohibit reality from intruding upon the sensations of the third one, an eye best labelled and named ‘imagination.’ In other words, the title of this collection is but a vivid portrayal of what one will find beyond the cover: speculative poetry (with some exceptions) of the short kind – it sounds less magical when paraphrased thus simply, and that is why we have poetry, to restore the above-worldly character to the realm of words, one which is so often lost now that the chants have died on our jaded lips. This book is not for meditation, but for an experience of aesthetic enrichment, which I would argue is just as beneficial to our inner beings if not more. (Inspiration, for instance, finds its nourishment in such enrichment.)

Of course, in speculative poetry it is not just the words that are enchanted, but also its worlds. This collection visits a hundred and four of them; some worlds are so close to our own realm that they feel entirely like home, others are distant enough to cause vertigo if not approached carefully. Several domains of accursed wives have been included, who suffer under their husbands’ fundamental states of being; others are populated by anthropomorphic peoples, providing answers to the what-if’s where one envisions that our place in the universe was supplanted by a different creature or object; in yet others (or perhaps just one and the same) we get to follow the struggles of alchemists in their search for a fabled substance and the promise of an understanding of the All; two and a half cups of them are taken from Surrealities and stay true to this descriptive title by thoroughly challenging our concepts of what could be; and then there still remains the majority: those who do not adhere to any such overarching theme, being idiomatically detached and owing nothing to nobody, porting the reader to a varied assortment of dimensions, each as individual as the poem it belongs to – every one of them presented with the out most sensuality, going beyond mere visuals and sounds, where the reader can experience them olfactorily and tactilely, sometimes even perceiving them intuitively as if one was an inhabitant and not just a tourist.

Examplorum gratia are of course required. In some sphere of unknown distance from home, we readers are treated to ‘The Mating of the Storm Birds’ with its rich impressions:

[W]e hear the fierce ecstatic
krees! as they ride the gusts,
their song a descant
within the storm’s dense pounding. (p. 32)

An onomatopoeia is given character through the behaviour of the birds that voice it and is then anchored to the world by having its place against the backdrop revealed; all these elements combine to form a complete auditory imprint, which can be heard in stark distinction by our third eyes. Likewise we observe an anatomical part amplified with adjectives, its proper placement in the scenery revealed –

their great wingspans
white against the violet day,
or dark upon the stars,
we know the wind and rain
lie soon behind (p. 32)

– and this time a part of the storm birds’ role is also uncovered, already an infant intuition is being nursed. “[T]he drip and pool of water,” a ”muddied landscape,” and ”bones twisted like the struts of broken gliders” (pp. 32-33) brings a sense of solidity, of touch, to mind. Anything overtly olfactory is still missing, but the wet salt and sweet-savoury scent of a storm at sea is familiar enough to be implied if the image itself is lifelike enough, and the poem has made every effort for it to be so. We base our perceptions of what we understand to be real on the vividity of our sensory information and ability to form detailed, cohesive concepts, and when a text can make an unreal bird feel as real as the magpie on the roof who is cursing at our cat, that is a testament to the poem’s ability to speak to the aforementioned third eye.

In ‘Ancient Catch’ a fish is caught: ”[S]leek and monstrous, goggle-eyed, more atavistic than the broken skulls at Olduvai” (p. 22); in ‘Old Robots Are the Worst’ the ageing constructs lets their dementia show in their communication: ”Lurching down the stairs, asking questions twice, pacing in lopsided circles as they speculate aloud on the cycles of man, [...] one gets attached to the old things, inured to their clank and shuffle, accustomed to the slow caress of their crinkled rubber flesh” (pp. 48-49); in ‘The Nightmare Collector’ a horrid dream denizen waits for his visitors: ”From the hollow blackness of his flapping sleeves you can hear the pulse and thump of unborn shadows, a dense hysteric fugue winding up and down the bones of your sleep” (p. 40); in ‘Origami Rockets’ a childhood lunar-journey fantasy is quoted: ”The moon smells like a green apple. They walk freely on its skin without helmets or spacesuits” (p. 99); in ‘Horses of Light’ the emergence of a wondrous equine is narrated: ”As the storm runs west at dusk the light gives up the air, the lurching sea turns dark and sleek as otter skin, a great bloody horse blooms in the sun’s red setting” (p. 13); in ‘She Walks in Yellow to Please Her Lord’ a terrible wake follows a woman under the influence of the king of the same colour: “She walks in yellow satin with gold and bile and stark obituaries” (p. 133); etc. – no matter how far the poems distance theirs from our own realm, the vividness remains just as strong and the impressions feel just as real.

As far as genres are concerned the span is immense, (if metaphorized as a bridge it would traverse the Atlantic at one of the narrower crossing points) – science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopia, magical realism, bizarro, surrealism, etc. – it would not be a surprise to find all subgenres of speculative writing here, and a few of the poems fall even outside of that. But even those who refuse to fall under that broad hat ‘speculative’ are not truly deviants, their ways are much the same – in ‘My Wife Returns as She Would Have It’ a grieving widower who feels his deceased wife’s presence in a butterfly: ”[A]n epiphany of color in my flat world, the butterfly appears to be listening. Brilliantly hued wings shift slowly up and down as if they sense the coarse human sounds filling the air” (p. 71) – and the magic of the words is not lost merely because they are spent on Earth.

Inevitably there is much more to be said about this collection, forty one years is a long time after all, and the dark artwork by Luke Spooner, under the alias Carrion House, are also worth a deliberation of their own. But to do this collection justice, massive and far-reaching as it is, is too great an undertaking for one mere review. Fortunately there are two reviews here on Goodreads that fill parts of the gap: One by Matthew David Campbell and one by Steven Withrow, the latter of which benefits from a deeper understanding of the inner workings of poetry, an understanding well beyond that of this reviewer. As far as this review is concerned, it seeks to impart two things primarily: That the highly saturated imagery placed before the third eye is one of the great strengths of this collection, and to give an impression of what allures are held in its myriad of worlds. A tourist’s curiosity whose appetite is not satiable by our own world, will find its diner here.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

For someone who was at a time not a huge fan of poetry-filled books, I am now finding myself reading them a lot as of late. My latest, of course, being Brief Encounters with My Third Eye. This is a collection of work that spans the decades beginning in the early 70’s. There is quite an eclectic mix from Sci-Fi to Horror to Surreal and more. I like how the book’s offerings are divided by decade as it gives us a glimpse into how Boston has progressed in both his writing style and thoughts.

A bit like tripping the light fantastic, words glide over the pages showcasing over 100 short poems and along with the interior artwork by Luke Spooner this makes for a fascinating read. The early years show a darker side and as we move up through the decades the poetry becomes more reflective. With wit and aplomb, Boston lets us peek into that third eye of his!

[John Thomas Allen 2nd · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a unique Twilight Zonish feel to Bruce Boston's poems, and I was sorry to hear of his passing. An original.