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Bone Silence
This poetry collection will draw you into such a rich and deep profound experience, that you will identify that experience as your own. Only the exceptional poets can do this. Peycho Kanev is exceptional - he is a magician. He turns words into living things. He makes the boundaries between poetry and reality disappear. He will transform you when you read this book.
- GenresPoetry
154 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 28, 2010
128 people want to read
About the author
Peycho Kanev
25 books318 followersPeycho Kanev is the author of 12 poetry collections and three chapbooks, published in the USA and Europe. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others. His new book of poetry titled A Fake Memoir was published in 2022 by Cyberwit.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 17, 2011
"Bone Silence", by Peycho Kanev, is a constant reminder to us all that poetry usurps reality. Kanev takes readers in many directions, constantly returning the reader to the familiar. The various themes and symbolic repetitions of the works create a narrative larger than the individual pieces. Kanev draws us into his worlds, leaving us there to experience the familiarity of his voice, which seems to become our own. "Bone Silence" belongs in any serious collection of modern poetry today.
Glenn Lyvers
Poetry Quarterly
Peycho Kanev’s newest book of poetry called Bone Silence was captivating from the very start. He employs many different poetic devices and forms. This book is filled with many thought provoking, dark and gritty sentiments. The narrative dialogue is blunt and unyielding. This is not a light hearted read of romanticized ear tickling, rather, it is cold realism. Bone Silence came across as a book of self review. A place in life at which youth and death walk tightropes across the conscious mind and collapses into ink and paper which carry the scent of cheap wine and cigarettes. The surreal and mind commandeering thoughts and imagery will leave you blinking the rose tint from your eyes. Bone Silence is a vital read to all who want to enjoy some cloudy sky poetry.
Tannen Dell and Michael Whitaker,
Editors of Indigo Rising
Peycho Kanev’s poetry collection, Bone Silence, evokes a theme repeating throughout: Our bones outlast us and remain our only testament in the world, even the greatest of us. Over time we are forgotten, our words are lost, and in the soil a story bones can’t tell. The writer pushes against death, strives for immortality in a temporal and zero-sum world or, as the author puts it: “as the tomb rock rolls among/the skulls of the geniuses of the past.”
Kanev opens the writer’s tale by yearning for the Word and illustrating the hard life that comes with seeking it. Automatically, this is a spiritual journey: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). This “mad God whirls” out of reach, and worse, He refuses to do anything about it.
Keeping with that spiritual tone, this work mirrors also King Solomon’s existential crisis in Ecclesiastes while at the same time proving, as Solomon said, there’s nothing new under the sun. There’s nothing new in this collection either, but that’s a despair granted always in art; the poet’s job is to update old metaphors for new souls. Bone Silence shrinks back, though, from the beautiful magic sprouting from the dung heap of Solomon’s pain: the admonishment to eat, drink, and be merry—for true, tomorrow we are wordless bones—and, perhaps more importantly, to climb out of this abyss eaten up with love. But there is no Song of Songs here to balance—to save!—the reader/writer from omnipotent nothingness or lessons to be learned from the mad glory of pain.
No, more likely that tale of salvation would be regarded as the cruelest of kitsch. And making an enemy of kitsch—those elusive and dreamy bright ideas with dangerous potential for brokenhearted emptiness—is a grand Eastern European tradition born of a long line of anti-Bohemian Bohemians. Kanev hurls the reader into the ethereal moment just before the Fall—the moment of realization that in less than an imaginary second gravity and vertigo will seize you, and your stomach will be in your throat. Kundera called it an unbearable lightness.
I’m hesitant to juxtapose writers with the immortal, and already I’ve slapped Kanev up against Solomon and Kundera. Others have paired him with Keats, Nabokov, and Joyce. To do so is not completely justifiable, for this work—important as it is to be considered—does not come as close to flawlessness as the others listed. Reading Bone Silence in one sitting proves fatiguing solely for the droning repetition of theme.
The Poetic Character—for we do not want to confuse the narrator with the poet—spends most of his time holed up in the extreme solitude of his bedroom, which is often peppered with naked and sleeping women for whom the narrator seems to have an underlying contempt; the way Kundera pairs sex with excrement, Kanev pairs sex with death. The Poetic Character is obsessed with the clock that is “slicing [him] slowly,” and if not pining about the illusion of time, he gazes out the window and mocks those daring to participate in the world. The rest of the time he drinks. And smokes. And obsesses over death and nothingness.
Cliché as it is—the soulful, misunderstood poet waxing misanthropic about the world—it’s fine for a hundred pages. But Bone Silence is 152 pages. It’s equivalent to drowning in the Hell of Sophie’s Choice. That is, of course, a compliment and criticism smashed together. Stopping at page 100, though, doesn’t get us to the best lines of the collection, which come on page 136 in the deceptively generic title, “Some Poetry”:
“This girl hikes up her skirt;
and now I can see where all the suffering has begun,
through the time and through the great music and through the paintings
of the masters we were fixed within the lie of the Art…”
And with that, he sums up the whole collection, but goes on for 15 pages more.
There are glimmers of hope. At one point our spiritually tortured Poetic Character, after noting the “horror” of a woman’s unbuttoned skirt, reaches to kill desire and finds love “dripping between [his] fingers.” This doesn’t last, naturally, but the misogyny does, and he notes that “The Girls of Today” “live in hollow state of mind.” He then ponders: “but imagine just for a moment that all of the/chocolates factories of the world stop production.”
The Poetic Character’s voice is authentic, so authentic you can hear his Eastern European accent, slip around on forgivable and brave failings of English subject-verb agreement. It makes one wonder if there were heated arguments between writer and editor over the “holly” man at the Vatican, if the imperfection was purposeful or masterfully accidental. And soon, if one is philosophically bent, one begins to wonder the same about the universe itself.
Enigmatic is the Word here, so much brightness pitched against a backdrop of omnipresent darkness. My daughter, as I raised her out of her crib one morning, asked me, “Where the dark go?” She’s too little to understand the dark is always there—it’s the light that goes away. Kanev, perhaps, could explain that to her best.
Jason Lee Miller
Gloom Cupboard
Glenn Lyvers
Poetry Quarterly
Peycho Kanev’s newest book of poetry called Bone Silence was captivating from the very start. He employs many different poetic devices and forms. This book is filled with many thought provoking, dark and gritty sentiments. The narrative dialogue is blunt and unyielding. This is not a light hearted read of romanticized ear tickling, rather, it is cold realism. Bone Silence came across as a book of self review. A place in life at which youth and death walk tightropes across the conscious mind and collapses into ink and paper which carry the scent of cheap wine and cigarettes. The surreal and mind commandeering thoughts and imagery will leave you blinking the rose tint from your eyes. Bone Silence is a vital read to all who want to enjoy some cloudy sky poetry.
Tannen Dell and Michael Whitaker,
Editors of Indigo Rising
Peycho Kanev’s poetry collection, Bone Silence, evokes a theme repeating throughout: Our bones outlast us and remain our only testament in the world, even the greatest of us. Over time we are forgotten, our words are lost, and in the soil a story bones can’t tell. The writer pushes against death, strives for immortality in a temporal and zero-sum world or, as the author puts it: “as the tomb rock rolls among/the skulls of the geniuses of the past.”
Kanev opens the writer’s tale by yearning for the Word and illustrating the hard life that comes with seeking it. Automatically, this is a spiritual journey: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). This “mad God whirls” out of reach, and worse, He refuses to do anything about it.
Keeping with that spiritual tone, this work mirrors also King Solomon’s existential crisis in Ecclesiastes while at the same time proving, as Solomon said, there’s nothing new under the sun. There’s nothing new in this collection either, but that’s a despair granted always in art; the poet’s job is to update old metaphors for new souls. Bone Silence shrinks back, though, from the beautiful magic sprouting from the dung heap of Solomon’s pain: the admonishment to eat, drink, and be merry—for true, tomorrow we are wordless bones—and, perhaps more importantly, to climb out of this abyss eaten up with love. But there is no Song of Songs here to balance—to save!—the reader/writer from omnipotent nothingness or lessons to be learned from the mad glory of pain.
No, more likely that tale of salvation would be regarded as the cruelest of kitsch. And making an enemy of kitsch—those elusive and dreamy bright ideas with dangerous potential for brokenhearted emptiness—is a grand Eastern European tradition born of a long line of anti-Bohemian Bohemians. Kanev hurls the reader into the ethereal moment just before the Fall—the moment of realization that in less than an imaginary second gravity and vertigo will seize you, and your stomach will be in your throat. Kundera called it an unbearable lightness.
I’m hesitant to juxtapose writers with the immortal, and already I’ve slapped Kanev up against Solomon and Kundera. Others have paired him with Keats, Nabokov, and Joyce. To do so is not completely justifiable, for this work—important as it is to be considered—does not come as close to flawlessness as the others listed. Reading Bone Silence in one sitting proves fatiguing solely for the droning repetition of theme.
The Poetic Character—for we do not want to confuse the narrator with the poet—spends most of his time holed up in the extreme solitude of his bedroom, which is often peppered with naked and sleeping women for whom the narrator seems to have an underlying contempt; the way Kundera pairs sex with excrement, Kanev pairs sex with death. The Poetic Character is obsessed with the clock that is “slicing [him] slowly,” and if not pining about the illusion of time, he gazes out the window and mocks those daring to participate in the world. The rest of the time he drinks. And smokes. And obsesses over death and nothingness.
Cliché as it is—the soulful, misunderstood poet waxing misanthropic about the world—it’s fine for a hundred pages. But Bone Silence is 152 pages. It’s equivalent to drowning in the Hell of Sophie’s Choice. That is, of course, a compliment and criticism smashed together. Stopping at page 100, though, doesn’t get us to the best lines of the collection, which come on page 136 in the deceptively generic title, “Some Poetry”:
“This girl hikes up her skirt;
and now I can see where all the suffering has begun,
through the time and through the great music and through the paintings
of the masters we were fixed within the lie of the Art…”
And with that, he sums up the whole collection, but goes on for 15 pages more.
There are glimmers of hope. At one point our spiritually tortured Poetic Character, after noting the “horror” of a woman’s unbuttoned skirt, reaches to kill desire and finds love “dripping between [his] fingers.” This doesn’t last, naturally, but the misogyny does, and he notes that “The Girls of Today” “live in hollow state of mind.” He then ponders: “but imagine just for a moment that all of the/chocolates factories of the world stop production.”
The Poetic Character’s voice is authentic, so authentic you can hear his Eastern European accent, slip around on forgivable and brave failings of English subject-verb agreement. It makes one wonder if there were heated arguments between writer and editor over the “holly” man at the Vatican, if the imperfection was purposeful or masterfully accidental. And soon, if one is philosophically bent, one begins to wonder the same about the universe itself.
Enigmatic is the Word here, so much brightness pitched against a backdrop of omnipresent darkness. My daughter, as I raised her out of her crib one morning, asked me, “Where the dark go?” She’s too little to understand the dark is always there—it’s the light that goes away. Kanev, perhaps, could explain that to her best.
Jason Lee Miller
Gloom Cupboard
February 15, 2011
Mood, that’s what Peycho Kanev writes. The poet taps out poetry that is colorless, smoky; images such as “Empty Space”, a poem that leaves the reader “in an empty bed/ with the swirling smoke/ and the burnt desire.” Pecyho’s poetry has soul, the kind of soul that’s only found in the atmosphere of old black and white movies.
A collection of poetry should not be a jumble of stanzas and haphazard, leap frogging images. A collection should contain moving images and motifs instead of plots and a story; things more than the book’s binding and glue that keep it together. Time, for Peycho’s narrator, as in the same for Keats, is always against the poet. There’s immediacy, an urgency shared by all artists, it’s the anxiety of artists: Time. “While Shaving” and “Metronome” are excellent poems that convey this worried hurry.
Writers write about writing; sometimes their characters and narrators write about writing, too. Peycho Kanev’s Bone Silence stands alongside James Joyce, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, and Charles Bukowski, all who were writes that wrote about writing. This style has a side effect that is rare for readers. It causes the reader not to break any reading taboos about blurring the writer and the narrator. Additionally it’s enjoyable to read about a writer finding the right words. Writers know what to do when the words come, but waiting is a beast that is never tamed, as seen in “Passage” and “Status Quo”. In these poems, poetry is the focus of the poetry. In “Easy Afternoon” God is poetry and poetry is God, but in the presence of the almighty, the reader counts the limited commodity of life and treasures the experience in its seasons of stagnation and weird, quirky conversations.
Peycho’s voice is the voice of an internationalist (“living in three continents”) that has been warped by seeing what every college graduate is told to see—the world. The atmosphere, the mood, of the book says that the world is much smaller than any map or desk top globe lets on. It’s so small, in fact, that the human imagination hasn’t the elbow room for its art. But the imagination much like the human it resides in can make a habitat of any environment.
The poems in Bone Silence reflect a small world. But it’s not paranoia out to get the reader; when all the lights are out and something soft and classical is playing like in “Sitting in Wolf’s Apartment” or “Some Poetry”; as a candle dances shadows behind the furniture, that’s where Bone Silence is, shifting, between light and dark. Buy this book of visions. Buy Bone Silence. Read Bone Silence then put it on your shelf, but you won’t forget it.
A collection of poetry should not be a jumble of stanzas and haphazard, leap frogging images. A collection should contain moving images and motifs instead of plots and a story; things more than the book’s binding and glue that keep it together. Time, for Peycho’s narrator, as in the same for Keats, is always against the poet. There’s immediacy, an urgency shared by all artists, it’s the anxiety of artists: Time. “While Shaving” and “Metronome” are excellent poems that convey this worried hurry.
Writers write about writing; sometimes their characters and narrators write about writing, too. Peycho Kanev’s Bone Silence stands alongside James Joyce, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, and Charles Bukowski, all who were writes that wrote about writing. This style has a side effect that is rare for readers. It causes the reader not to break any reading taboos about blurring the writer and the narrator. Additionally it’s enjoyable to read about a writer finding the right words. Writers know what to do when the words come, but waiting is a beast that is never tamed, as seen in “Passage” and “Status Quo”. In these poems, poetry is the focus of the poetry. In “Easy Afternoon” God is poetry and poetry is God, but in the presence of the almighty, the reader counts the limited commodity of life and treasures the experience in its seasons of stagnation and weird, quirky conversations.
Peycho’s voice is the voice of an internationalist (“living in three continents”) that has been warped by seeing what every college graduate is told to see—the world. The atmosphere, the mood, of the book says that the world is much smaller than any map or desk top globe lets on. It’s so small, in fact, that the human imagination hasn’t the elbow room for its art. But the imagination much like the human it resides in can make a habitat of any environment.
The poems in Bone Silence reflect a small world. But it’s not paranoia out to get the reader; when all the lights are out and something soft and classical is playing like in “Sitting in Wolf’s Apartment” or “Some Poetry”; as a candle dances shadows behind the furniture, that’s where Bone Silence is, shifting, between light and dark. Buy this book of visions. Buy Bone Silence. Read Bone Silence then put it on your shelf, but you won’t forget it.
March 10, 2011
So far these are fun to read and make sense to me. I bemused by the Kanev's English at times. We have to supply the correct verb tense or formation. It started off with a poem with red ants and I told my friends about that and we agreed it was good. The mix of emotions in these poems intrigued me. I enjoyed the many references to drinking, love making, the aloneness, the not fitting in, the fitting in, and capturing the immediacy of a moment. Good job Peycho!
Want to read
November 13, 2011I have to read this book if just for the title. I can envision the author writing similar to me and penning something like: Don’t let a mime speak for you
and expect to be heard.
Can you see what I’m saying?
-- Arthur Tugman
And if bones could talk skeletons would no longer have to creek.
and expect to be heard.
Can you see what I’m saying?
-- Arthur Tugman
And if bones could talk skeletons would no longer have to creek.
May 9, 2015
Whether conscious or not, I am guessing the title of Peycho's collection comes from a Charles Bukowski poem posthumously published in "Come On In." That flag's a certain amount of Bukowski's spirit that rides through this collection, often to the effect that I would rather hear Peycho's voice, as when he departs from Bukowski riffs is where the best light shines through. All writing is inspired by others and I don't believe there is true individuality in anything, as such, but my favorite poems in this collection are those they enter the poetic over the confessional, or observational.
At the start of the collection, I was disappointed, noting a great many grammatical abnormalities I immediately realized were due to Kanev's writing in English as an alternate tongue. At first I was wondering why he didn't just get a hand straightening those out and having a friend edit it, but as I read on, I grew to enjoy the true color of his voice and certainly remain impressed by the richness of his language and the high degree of utility of the language. By the end, upon reflection, many people in the US are not capable of using the language as he does.
Over all, a passion for writing and a genuine character shine through more than anything, which is the most valuable facet of any writing, in my book.
At the start of the collection, I was disappointed, noting a great many grammatical abnormalities I immediately realized were due to Kanev's writing in English as an alternate tongue. At first I was wondering why he didn't just get a hand straightening those out and having a friend edit it, but as I read on, I grew to enjoy the true color of his voice and certainly remain impressed by the richness of his language and the high degree of utility of the language. By the end, upon reflection, many people in the US are not capable of using the language as he does.
Over all, a passion for writing and a genuine character shine through more than anything, which is the most valuable facet of any writing, in my book.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews