Review of my "everything essential", by Carolyn Srygley-Moore

The book reviewed below, 205 pages of poems, & including a version of the new posthuman poetry manifesto, is on sale at this link. This link is to the book on Amazon UK, &, of course, this link is to Amazon USA. As always, i would prefer that you buy it from Lulu direct, but, if you hate trade unions or just need free shipping from Prime, you can use goddam Amazon.

Very grateful for this review of my (very soon) forthcoming everything essential by Carolyn Srygley-Moore. Delighted by this, I preserve her formatting as well as possible, given the exigencies of blogging. I would simply point out that I am not a philosopher, & am not sure what that would even mean (thus alluding, & without a trace of embarrassment, to Derrida), & I would add that memory, fairly obviously, is confabulation, telling stories. But still it's real, for, like all illusory constructs, time is perfectly real on its own terms. 

Review of everything essential
A book by David C. McLean.
By Carolyn Srygley-Moore, author of ‘miracles of the BloG: a series & Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors & other books, also with one forthcoming in the future from Posthuman Poetry & Prose.

“”

I am no philosopher.
However I’ve been a reader
And appreciator of David’s poetry for over a decade. (He is a writer of prose and a fine photographer as well.) We have also become friends. For a few years we lost contact. In those years David discovered & embraced
The Goddess.

When, via social media,
We first began exchanging writings
David professed a stern atheism; yet he
Arrived to my work (I then expressed
Myself as a Christian) without a derisive
Attitude; he was not contemptuous, and
Was able to read my work without derision.
That’s where I approach his new book.
With a blank slate attempted if not completely possible.

“”

McLean is a philosopher.
I arrive to this book with some cognizance
Of his prior work, and the tangentiality
That work has to this book.

“Ghosts.” That is
My echo. From my sense of his past work & the echo I cannot shake while reading.

“”

This book ,
Emma, & the poet, fuse into an amazement, a carnal revival occurring
On the head of a pin. There is no time.
Memory exists in the sensate, the beast,
A celebration that cannot be named
For language would corrupt that celebration.

“”

David, the person, tells me that we — humans, beings, sentient —; have no past.
Maybe all beings, in fact.

Yet memory, in these poems, is acknowledged. Remember that language
By no fault —: corrupts.

This is not the pop psychology of so called “false memory.” For memory in these
Poems is. Present carnal sacred.

“”

Is Emma (by the perspective of one who feels constrained by time as construct) a way of erasing
History per-say ( which David calls to my attention as “not mentioned” in the book)
Of radically traveling via Emma & goddess
Into the past, bringing back with him
The ghosts that riddled his early
Books with a kind of stasis however
Appreciative of the absurd //; returning
In Emma’s skirt pockets ghosts that
Have heartbeats without degeneration,
For time, and the past, are not
To be acknowledged. The Goddess is.

Without time; with the circularity, the
Regeneration exigent to the Goddess
Paradigm:
Emma exists past the perversion by
A language that McLean crafts
Flawlessly, intensely, even effortlessly.
As the reader I felt
Gratification that any
Person could experience love
With the transgressive intensity
Embodied in these poems.
The blaze, the beauty, and the
Resultant affirmation of what
Truth can be //: this is what I take
Away. & I am
Happy, especially for my friend.

“”

Foucault & Kafka, the incarceration &
The prisoner of the Penal Colony ::
Are crashed into, crushed as shell to
Grit. & we are freed. We are
Liberated by a manipulator of
Language// through
Language. We are left without
Corruption & the
Feeling Is marvelous.

Hence: even to those who find history
A weight, a presumptive cargo -/:
To whom trying to see time as not only irrelevant but nonexistent-:

What is remembering?

“”

What is sacred? Not time. Not the past.
But the dance on the head of a pin,
Beyond carnal, love, all consuming.

Emma is a means of liberation for
Those who devour these poems.
Where decay & death are acknowledged,
Even death —: endings are not.
All is infinite. A comforting, and uncomfortable, insinuation.

“Here we are memory” is a poem title
That gives me permission to read
These poems, & my personhood,
As a dialogue & confrontation & challenge
To /: my history my past. My ghosts
My memory. It is a profound
Permission coming from David
McLean, grab it. Writer. Philosopher.

Hold on.
Prepare yourself for a festival.
Dark & bright,

Carolyn Srygley-Moore