Praise and Poems
Irish poet Niall McDevitt confronts taboo subjects such as unemployment, alienation, poverty, immigration etc. not with confessions but with parables. Art—and the artistic genius of London—is ringingly affirmed. Here we depart from the ‘whatever you say, say nothing’ school. McDevitt is a maverick in the David Gascoyne/John Wieners/Michael Hartnett line.
b/w is politico-religious, a 100 page temple. Not only is a super-eloquent voice given to the underclass—‘major religions cultures histories in their bloods’—but to the McWorld vs. Jihad era. The poems are always about more than they are about, suggestive of the zeitgeist. His is not a brick-by-brick London but a London of the psychosphere, densely populated with genies, spies, artists, prostitutes et al on their chosen edges. A suite of mystical songs to ‘Sophia’ offsets the eviscerating satires. The Queen’s English is shadowed by Pidgin English. Political correctness is trashed, not from the right but from the left. Shakespeare, Blake, Rimbaud, Yeats are the city psychopomps. This is a unique book: Judeo-Apache, avant-folk, urban sha-manic. Read it with drum.
A luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries. The shamanic poems are the thing itself. b/w is superb.
Jeremy Reed
The Netherworld Hotel blew me away. I loved it.
John Cooper Clarke
This is a very good poem
Patti Smith on ‘Rimbaud’
There’s a lot of meat on the bone. The man has talent.
Heathcote Williams
THE ICON
for Sophia
this fury and sorrow
is of the icon
emanating from the icon
who works for pharaohs
is seen in falcons
and carvings of falcons
there is no tomorrow
for man or woman
but in the woman
who in her burrow
a mind is making
an intelligence is making
as bow-and-arrow
its target is seeking
its tip is seeking
to pierce the marrow
of the living token
and the dying token
the falcon is furrowed
its god is forsaken
its cosmology is forsaken
for ones and zeros
the images are broken
the icon is broken
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