: Review: crudely mistaken
for life: by Wolfgang Carstens.
A first book of poetry by this Canadian
author, demonstrates the many ways we deny death in a world obsessed by our very fears. At just under a hundred pages of sparse wording, this well
crafted tome offers a frontal view of existence in a medium of
cyclical death. It is a primal teaching of appreciation for those who
would care to fully live, rather than end living at the front door of
the store.
“Beds are staging grounds for
graves/slumber is dress rehearsal for death”
Two 'D' words dominate, nay, permeate
the cascading columns of dire thoughts, page after page. Dead and
dreaming, and yet the point becomes sharper as the dirge of despair
settles around the reader's ears; oh yes! Despite the exposure to
unvarnished realism of end of life scenario..each emotional sequence
and its natural consequence rests full weight on moral ground aiming
for the light of conscience. Ultimately the book remains a testament
to personal responsibility..
If at first I fell into an overwhelming
sense of heaviness, it was for the very weight of the unadorned
biographic context. Once I sank into Wolfgang' s extended message of
larger effect, raising the drapes of preconception, to allow myself
to drift into a state of gratitude. Truth may best be served cool;
though one hundred pages are lightly peppered with bullets of
“bullshit”and “wrecking balls to swing in our
direction”..respect for language and integrity underline
Carstens' poetry.
For art' s sake brings
to mind the purity of selection disturbed only by the gun which tears
the natural order. Man, the link which breaks the whole chain.
A palpable northern climes mentality
permeates the casually woven threads of stories of the wilds of
Alberta or British Columbia. Be it Scandinavia or Siberia, that clean
cut nihilism seems to cool the texts of writers who have known the
long winters of life wherever they have parked their keyboards.. like
Lapp, Mongolian or Inuit tales which carry an undisguised truth about
the more brutal elements facing birth onward, each unpainted face
stares out of this body of writing to remind the reader of the value
of the moment. And this is the hard won strength of the book,
wherever scribed.
When I say that this book must be felt
aloud, I fully mean voiced, not as a craft, but as declarations of
love for a life so oft denied to self or other between punishing
silence and emotional pollution.
Evocative pictures paint the contrasts
in parenting styles. Love makes its appearance at bedsides and
graveside. Regret must find its uneasy place between tenderness and
failure, it's all there. Humor sneaks in “drama of flesh”
6 snow balls play out the lives of predictable marital imperfection.
This book is a microcosm of a finite species marching through
infertile fields on its way to self annhilation.
Notes on Seed
depicts the ghosts at the reins of this ride we call family life,
giving way to a slovenly grip on responsibility. Every social issue
laid flat in short stanzas, not a word wasted..several decades of
dying culture examined in the parameters of one snuff film. The
author drives the blade upon habits and addicts sold by the zealous
media, by greedy industry, by lazy conscience.
“as
time wages war upon my flesh/ and my organs threaten mutiny” shake
up the flat-lining perception of well being. The author throws a few
bricks at religious constructs and familiar expectations in the
quotidian theater we call living in the living rooms where we cajole,
placate or hide from certain death. Where we reinvent joy temporarily
to perpetuate the hormonal cycle of acceptable , response to
surroundings. In
death and chocolate true
love is revealed above all notions; the boy, the woman, the bugs, all
defy fleshy limitations. this is a story of intense awareness that
sticks to the plexus.
The
personal reveals the universal condition, Carstens seriously makes
use of the literary right to uncover ignorant bliss..to disturb the
endemic monotony of a replicated global market of spent response. In
that, he mocks the very poet within “ we
were happy without word/ without poems/without you.”
Though one look at the repetitive cover
design of arty skulls may precipitate cultish prejudice, the old
adage avers true here as well. Peek past the emptiness of the brown
graphics and discover a shaky sanity rendered in less than strange
realism. Epic Rites has delivered yet another grounded, solid
and ethical piece in Wolfgang Carstens' book of poetry.
