Review Phoenix Rising from the Ashes

An appeal to poetry critics to review The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium
 
Since its publication in November 2013, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium, has generally been met with positive reviews from purchasers and poetry reviewers. As editor of the anthology, I for one freely admit that several authors display considerable talent, while some, I believe, are exceptional sonneteers who have penned poems, which may one day be viewed as masterpieces of the genre.
 
There are also scores of sonnets in languages other than English,French, Spanish, Chinese, German and Farsi, while the English sonnets run from page 15 to 135, comprising 60% of the total in the anthology, sonnets in all other languages span pages 142 to 222, accounting for the remaining 40%.
 
A number of reviewers have already accorded decent marks to the anthology and I sincerely believe that most new critics and informed readers will be able to dispassionately review the anthology. On the other hand, it is equally incumbent to flag at least a few of the sonnets which display considerable talent and especially those which you, as a reviewer, consider to be jewels, pièces de résistence.
 
I am not saying that those of you poetry critics who read English only should feel discouraged from reviewing the anthology. Far from it, it is generally taken for granted that the majority of literary critics of English literature are allophone English, given that English is almost universally considered lingua franca of the world. Of course, I also welcome bilingual or multilingual critics, who are well positioned to critique the remaining 40% of “foreign- language” sonnets.
 
I entreat those of you who are poetry critics to give your dispassionate opinion of the anthology, what we are looking for is an objective appraisal, insofar as it is humanly possible. It does not matter whether you find the anthology below average, average or superior.
 
Regardless of your overall appraisal of the merits and demerits of this anthology, I shall send you all your own copy of the PDF version. Finally, it would be beneficial to the editors and sonneteers alike if you would rate it on a scale from 1 to 5. Also, the Editor who is at present publishing this appeal, every reviewer should bear this in mind, has promised to publish any of the reviews providing they are fair minded & objective in at at least two of the three sites herein listed: Motherbird.com, Artvilla.com or Poetry Life & Times.
 
I am grateful for the endorsement of this appeal by Robin Ouzman Hislop of Poetry, Life and Times. Richard Vallance
 
The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes http://vallance22.hpage.com is also available in hard cover, soft cover and PDF formats from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Chapters.ca, among other online outlets.
 
The home page of the author, Richard Vallance, now a well-established professional historical linguist of ancient Mycenaean Greek, is Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae https://linearbknossosmycenae.wordpress.com, which has become the premier site for research into Linear B on the Internet since its inception in 2013. An internationally acknowledged historical linguist, in 2015 he was published in an international European conference proceedings and in the prestigious annual, Archaeology and Science (Belgrade), and is set to be published later this year in at least one other major international venue for historical linguistics. He is also an active member of one of the world’s most professional research sites, academia.edu, where you will find his page at https://westernu.academia.edu/RichardVallance/Papers

 
 
 
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Reviews & Comments on Robin Ouzman Hislop’s Collected Poems. All the Babble of the Souk.

 

 

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All the babble of the Souk
all the life of the planet &
so little part of it, that I breathe

Janet Caldwell, COO at Inner Child Ltd, author of the Author Den’s award winning “5 degrees to separation” Robin is a philosopher, poet, published author and more. It has been my privilege to reap the benefits of this man’s knowledge on an array of subjects.  A man ahead of his time. A true visionary

David Michael Jackson, Web Publisher at Artvilla.com Robin is a brilliant writer and philosopher as well as a recognized poet. He is an editor and contributor for Poetry Life and Times and other publications. ~

Richard Vallance, Linguist Linear B, Knossos & Mycenaean. Robin is a highly innovative and gifted poet, who excels in writing sonnets, blank verse and haiku, and in translating poetry from Spanish into English. His work is first-rate.

Gary Beck – All the Babble of the Souk is an elegant journey through both foreign and familiar climes. Anything but babble. Time and space bend in mysterious mists and mechanistic voyages. The poems pulsate with languid images that add to the wonder of travel to exotic places.

Scott Hastie – A collection of real substance that is long overdue. Robin writes with impressive depth and across a spread of philosophic stimuli that he makes uniquely his own. You do not have to travel long before you trip over killer lines, again and again… This is fresh, original and mature work, grown from one special creative soul’s well seasoned experience. Robin truly has a voice that is his own and it has been worth the wait to see it flower…

Robin Marchesi – High time this great Poet was properly in print. His Poems resonate like the work of Cavafy and Gibran. They are deep and revealing, resonating in one’s inner self. This book will stimulate your metaphysical being. Robin’s Poetry opens you to questions about who you are…. Essential reading……

R. W. Haynes – Robin Ouzman Hislop’s All the Babble of the Souk grips elemental tangles with wisely wistful authority, making a claim both for the adequacy of animate language and for erudite perception. Counterpointing the abstruse and the inescapably basic, these poems draw upon a power that surprises, engaging the reader in the poet’s heartfelt conversation with a tradition and its diverse voices, including T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. Hislop’s retro-modernist recovery of vision argues for a refreshed perception of poetic possibility and a turn from the infinite regress of the verse which echoes the empty sophistry of twentieth-century language philosophers. Music, with its syncopation, minor chords, pauses, accelerations, jingles, knocks, and elegiac phrases constitutes a crucial part of the essence of this splendid collection.

Ian Irvine (Hobson) – The metaphor of the ‘marketplace’ or ‘bazaar’ – symbolic in this collection of public spaces generally (both physical and cultural/mediatised) – launches this remarkable collection of poems by a poet, editor and creative thinker of international significance. The ‘souk’ is a place of trade, chance meetings, overheard conversations and communal eating. This collection also links it to our post-post modern state of life in the face of cultural globalisation. However, rather than theorise key aspects of our world we are invited to explore them instead as states of being – with joyous and anxious dimensions. As the poet/narrator mingles, observes, samples and digests (in poem after poem) a colourful array of stimuli – sensorial, relational and intellectual – we gradually feel our perception of life and the species crisis/moment deepen and expand. The melancholy grandeur of the human predicament slowly comes into focus – largely through the poet’s gift of empathy. A wonderful selection of poems updating for the new millennia themes mulled over by the likes of Baudelaire (in Paris Spleen), Apollinaire (in Zone), George Oppen (in Of Being Numerous) and many other great 19th and 20th century poets.

Marie Marshall –  Robin’s poetry is often just a ride, lines in little stanzas like

    •           holding all shadows to account
        The hag in her rags begs her bag

each a new thought after a pause for breath, or so it seems, each with an image that sparkles, almost with effrontery. That’s how I like my poetry – image, sound, and bare-faced cheek.

As the images pile up, or maybe I unearth more as I drill down, discovering depth in the poetry, I know he’s not your average Internet Joe, but a man with a mean, keen pen, he knows how to play, how to make free, how to brew poetry:

    •         Riding along in our dream machine
    •          our virtual reality all but a scream
    •          no exit
    •          blood on the wind screen, faithful Fido’s gone
    •          the machine’s a mess, – every where’s a gas.

A trickle through a diaphanous sheen

a thin crust peels, roll the dice
a question of ethics, the cost of life.

Y’know, somewhere along the line, Ezra Pound and John Cooper Clarke rolled dice for this man’s soul, and I can’t say who won. Maybe he walked away laughing while the bones still tumbled, soul intact. I hope so. He has the measure of our suburbs, seeing how

    • the phallus of a Sunday afternoon
        gleamed cleaned cars

let us (you’re here too, and I have morphed into ‘we’) catch our reflection in that polished surface, wondering how to measure the depth of the shine. Meanwhile

    1. Danger, Deep Water, Keep Out

As if we could. The collection has the feel of a single work, as though the poet sat down, started at the beginning, wrote the middle, and stopped at the end. We ride. It’s the same ride all the time, but the scenery outside the window shifts, and fellow passengers come and go. Occasionally we get off, but only to stretch our legs

As we celebrate

life lies dead on the table

we eat it

The poet is aware of the shape of his work on the page, of its concreteness. The poet knows when to be serious and when not to, and he knows when to muddy the water of each with the other. When he says ‘Watch my stick’, you hear ‘This means you!’ The poet can make a dream return from the rubble of artifice. I know poetry when I see it.

Norman Ball, writer, author of Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments – Before I get to the book itself, I’d like to offer up a confession. Robin and I have, over the years, engaged in some fascinating discussions on such far-flung topics as Big Bang contrarianism, the mystery of consciousness, theories of memes, multiverses, Popper falsifiability and vitalism, just to name a few; in short, the usual water cooler chatter. Or maybe not. Robin’s a whole lot smarter than me. Nonetheless it’s a lot of fun trying to keep up. If you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, we’re odd ducks of a feather.

For one thing, Hislop is not averse to the occasional Latinate or ism getting tossed into a stanza. Of course poetical exploration of High Concept puts one at odds with the prevailing penchant for concrete image and tactile adhesives. There are many in poetry today who insist that, if you can’t say something nice about a spatula, a garden hose or a lamppost, you have no business trafficking in periphrasis. Everything must be grounded in the real, they say—as if such a thing as the real really existed. If I may say, oh prevailing sentiment in poetry, get real.

So, perhaps All the Babble of the Souk is not for everyone. But then, what of any value ever is? Poetry marches under a Big Spatula and we all can’t be flipping fried eggs and hash. Besides, in the hands of a deftly abstract mind, abstraction is not exactly a kick in the head. Nor will it break the yokes and spoil your breakfast. What is a speculative poetic excursion, after all, but high imagination and eccentricity commiserating via language? Let the arbiters of bric a brac catalog the quotidian like good flea marketeers. Such people are born to rummage about in the attic and log their heirlooms on eBay. Hislop doesn’t trammel their kiosks. He has Big Thoughts to mull.

Fresh off a personally intense eye-mind exploration , I found myself greatly predisposed to ‘Maps’, a four-piece series of poetic aphorisms that offers some dazzling insights into how we demarcate our space, time and existence, and especially how these elements are conveyed, if not even defined, by our senses:
This notion of time having a real job to do immediately put me in mind of John Archibald Wheeler: “Time is what prevents everyt hing from happening at once.” Hislop may be onto something even more subtle: Does time keep chaos at bay, allowing time for our disparate senses to marry their qualia into a coherent universe? Perhaps those with Synesthesia are more evolved creators of worlds, their gaps between sound and vision less discontinuous.

‘Maps’ delivered me to a speculation I wouldn’t have reached otherwise. And I find that’s a critical function of Hislop’s poetry. It gathers, then points away. More important than the resolved landing place is how it offers a hospitable ‘symposium’, couching philosophical fields of inquiry within poetic metaphor from which the reader’s own speculative arcs can then rise and take tangential flight; speculations feeding speculations. What does resolution ever resolve anyway? Conclusions are overrated. The concrete of the concretists doesn’t exist in a world:

Imposed as        an impression     seeking an ineffable concrete      in an abstraction     which defies location. —from ‘Red Butterflies’

In ‘From Here to Silence, three’, he sets up a free will versus determinism tug-of-war stalked by Nietzschean recurrence and Leonard Susskind’s holographic 2D picture-show. You got a problem with that, Rod McKuen?

          1. Say we are not sui generis
        1.            (the cause of yourself)
        2.             we are homeostatic holographs
        3. dimensions in spectral parallel membranes
        4. our near eternal process to err
        5. along such a line we pass time in, time out      but could we not cheat the butterfly effect?

 

The stanza ends on the plaintive hope, reminiscent of Kafka that our cycle of error could end if freewill achieved grace but for an instant. Let us hope that moment arrives as I’m so tired of breaking my shoelace the day before Thanksgiving forever.

Am I losing the yucksters in all the heavy universe lifting? Not so fast. Hislop can be funny too. ‘At a Slant’ has a droll quality that still draws a snicker if for no other reason than that we’re stuck, all together (‘but it’s the same for all of us!’):

The con of life

the weirdness of its melodramatic sham

how good we are at yesterday, tomorrow

always better than before

like, being had – in the process by it.

The juxtaposed tenses of being had cement the interminable predicament we share. No exit. But at least we perfect our yesterdays until such time as we resume them anew, becoming rank amateurs all over again; amateurs though with a difference, with a modicum of acquired wisdom and an almost imperceptibly elevated rank.

Okay, so it’s bleak, black humor. But there are shafts of light. One day, though maybe yet a half-eternity away, some butterfly will escape the dark matter of our descending shoe. (Butterflies pervade Hislop’s poetry.) We’ll be released to the next pristine universe armed with a butterfly-brain’s worth of hard-earned prescience. So yes, each successive Big Bang is not an unadulterated singularity. Some kernel of hard-earned wisdom gets borne through. Each new universe is a tooth on a slowly revolving gear that turns towards…perfection? In short, something barely better. Since Hislop asks, that’s what—I think, I hope—may be next:  ask, the near infinite      (in—the moment before you munch)        take a bit of the biscuit      before the Big Crunch   it’s an eternal packet      & having all, what’s next? —from ‘Lucky Hat Day’

All the Babble of the Souk will have you pondering your predicament in a whole new imaginative light. Reflect well my friend, as mindless impulsivity and materialist inanity are precisely what dangle this eternity over the present-day abyss. Therein may lie our paper-thin chance for freedom: by insect increment, one pardoned butterfly per eon at a time.

Richard Vallance, writer, author of Canadian Spirit Voices – If “All the Babble of the Souk” is anything but memorable — as it surely is — it is so because of its sweeping portrayal of the tumultuous market that is humankind. The “babble” of this bazaar is that of all the markets in the world — irrespective of nation, language, culture or race or for that matter, at the symbolic level, of any manifestation of our nature, be it “good” or “evil”, which are not opposing psychological or spiritual states as all too many naďvely imagine, but rather their subtle blending in our psyche. There is no suggestion of the presence or absence of God or a “god”. It is irrelevant. There is just humanity.

The poems, mostly quasi free form, some of them highly reminiscent of haiku, range from very short to a few pages long. Except for one poem and one only, Scale Free, in which we come face to face with some of the most beautiful imagery in the entire collection, and I quote:

A cuckoo taunts
high in the mountain
where are you?

there is not a single question to be found in the rest of the book. All the rest of the poems consist only of statements, some of them brief, others rather too long for my taste and some even downright convoluted. When this approach to poetry composition is carried to its extreme, it can and sometimes does result in the overly prosaic. That is the only real quarrel I have with this collection. Fortunately, there are only only a handful of poems which are painfully prone to the prosaic. Among these are Mannequins, the whole series Maps 1,2,3,4, The Prisoners, Non Linear and in particular Rust (which reads more like a scientific tract than a poem), none of which have any real appeal to me.

The rest of the poems run from agreeable at the very least to the truly amazing. Among those poems agreeable to the mind and/or the ear I count: Passage, At the Party, Here Comes the Moon, Multiverse, The Pine at the Summit and Wind upon a River. Others like these will more or less please the reader. But as everyone knows, we all have our own preferences for the kinds of poetry we like. The poems which appeal more to one person appeal less to another. The aforementioned choices are merely my own.

Next come poems which display remarkable talent, such as: After Dylan on the Ninth Wave (which I for one particularly like), Africa North (haiku-like), A Witch for Halloween (in which we find some of the most striking chthonic imagery in the book), Core (commendable for its brevity, economy of verse & imagery), Entanglements (haiku-like), Sequence 1 & 2 (haiku-like) and Story of a Rose.

I have a marked preference for the poet’s haiku-like poems. Haiku have always strongly appealed to me. In fact, I myself, along with Robin Ouzman Hislop and so many other truly talented haijin, have composed a considerable number of poems of this nature, many of which were published in the print quarterly, Canadian Zen Haiku (2004-2010), which is now out of print. Brevity is the soul of wit, and indeed of the memorable. It is Robin Ouzman Hislop’ s more compact poems which please me the most. There are exceptions, poems which are not haiku-like or are somewhat lengthier. There are some truly memorable lines in these poems. For instance, we have:

from Africa North:

A winnowing canvass tosses corn
and
… as fireflies in the blazing day.

and finally
In the gloaming a solitary reaper reaps its shadow.
(Reminiscences of Wordsworth’ s, The Solitary Reaper, one of the most astonishingly beautiful poems in English.)

from After Dylan on the Ninth Wave, there are a considerable number of memorable lines, which you can explore for yourself. The poem is not quite up to Dylan Thomas… a very tough act to follow!

and from Core:

reaching my eye’s peninsula

sudden scene, solitary strand

All of the poems in this class pleased me a great deal.

Now we come to the downright brilliant poems, of which there are naturally only a few. I might as well cite them all. They are Scale Free (a series of haiku-like lines & almost pure haiku), A Split Second Later’s Late, Laminations in Lacquer, Lucky Hat Day and Red Butterflies, all of which had a powerful psychological and spiritual impact on me. Here are just a few of the lines from these truly remarkable poems which really struck me, and I mean really —

from A Split Second Later’s Late:

… a serpent’s spit according to legend.

from Laminations in Lacquer, the gripping lines:

Fireworks like a diaphanous lithograph
print an emblazoned sky
on the craggy mountains of the night
where comets play at kites
& glistening the eerie beak hisses.

and from Red Butterflies, where we find some of the most highly inspired, truly imaginative lines:

but as a collage on shifting sands…

A sword brazed in a fire
that does not distinguish
between the battle
& the field.

I believe we can safely say that the poet has achieved a level of poetic style and content which can hardly disappoint. Some of the poems in in “All the Babble of the Souk” remind me of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. Perhaps the most striking feature of this volume is the poet’s portrayal of humanity, which deprives us of any escape from the darker, more insidious depths of our human condition. The most striking imagery in the entire collection forces itself on the least flattering trait of of our nature, our tendency towards — I might as well say it flat out — bestiality, which leaps to the fore in the poet’s all too frequent comparison between homo sapiens and apes (King Simian, seeking simian), gorillas, baboons and other fierce beasts of that ilk, all the way to neanderthals, Australopithecus and the odious nocturnal lupine, the proverbial werewolf. Lines such as: the hairless ape, go ape, going bananas… all mercilessly zero in on our ape-like nature bedeviling our so-called civilized veneer.

There is also frequent reference to eating meat, and being eaten (we grow the meat we eat, those she didn’t eat alive, children simply to feed her, how they like human flesh, to be consumed by hell), all the way through to witchcraft and Zombie imagery. The dreadful presence of these creatures of the night inexorably lurks just beneath the thin veneer our blasé urbanity.

To cut to the quick, the most memorable qualities of Robin Ouzman Hislop’s poetic gifts are his penchant for economy of lines and the puissant imagery of the chthonic. Where these features dominate any poem, they impel it towards the nonpareil! Such poems soar. When it works, it works supremely well. As for the rest, there is much to please the reader.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Displays A Collection of Poetry by Gary Beck For Immediate Release

Displays cover
 
Unheard Arias
 
The purple finch and house finch
are unappreciated
by busy city dwellers,
who will never take the time
to listen for a moment
to their melodious song
that would please receptive ears
that are otherwise deafened
by the city commotion.
 
With religion, terror, and politics as closely related as ever, is it possible to live in our world without fear? With the obvious threat of extremists willing to kill for their god, we also endure domestic terrorism driven by similar motives, and the politicians who seek to use it all to their advantage for power. Poet Gary Beck explores many of the practical, emotional, and irrational responses to acts of terror with Displays, a collection of poetry that honestly examines the state of human reaction.
 
“We are impressed with your vibrant writing, emotionally impacted by your vivid imagery and awed by your superior craft.” – EM Literary Magazine
 
“The works you produce are unique and superbly written.” – Blackmail Press
 
“We really enjoy your use of imagery, descriptive language and insight.” – Avocet Magazine
 
Displays is a 140 page poetry volume. Available in paperback with a retail price of $11.99, and eBook with a retail price of $5.99. ISBN: 1941058361 Published through Winter Goose Publishing and available now through all major retailers. For more information or to request a review copy, contact Winter Goose Publishing at info@wintergoosepublishing.
 
http://www.amazon.com/Displays Gary Beck
 
Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director, and as an art dealer when he couldn’t make a living in theater. He has 11 published chapbooks. His poetry collections include: Days of Destruction (Skive Press), Expectations (Rogue Scholars Press). Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways, Displays (Winter Goose Publishing). Perceptions, Fault Lines and Tremors will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. Conditioned Response (Nazar Look). Blossoms of Decay will be published by Nazar Look. Resonance will be published by Dreaming Big Press. His novels include: Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press) Acts of Defiance (Artema Press). Flawed Connections (Black Rose Writing). His short story collection, A Glimpse of Youth (Sweatshoppe Publications). His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City.
 
Winter Goose Publishing is an independent publisher founded in 2011. We are a royalty-paying publisher dedicated to putting out the best literature in prose, poetry and art; covering a variety of genres. Go to wintergoosepublishing.com for more information.

 
 
 
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PRESS RELEASE – GREY SUN, DARK MOON, a new collection of poetry by Trevor Maynard

Covergsdm



casualty of war

tumble down water of the weir
rushing to my ear, sixty-three years
and fourteen days is enough for a life 
          every night, there is salt on my lips
          vomit in the sand, blood splattering in the loam
          bullets strafing, mortars, grenades, noise

missing in action was something too uncertain
it sent my wife to the arms of another
it was six months before they found me
          not a casualty as such, more a deserter
          they arrested me, they did not shoot me
          a beating detached my retina, I was unfit
six months more, they released me
let me loose to see out the rest of the war 
as a civilian, no fatigues, only fatigue
          many thought me a coward, a shirker
          some a traitor, or a spy, most felt envy
          hating me for living while their lovers died

tumbledown water of the weir
rushing to my ear, then a rocket
overhead, motor, motor, silent, whine
          one explosion, and one UXB, whimpering
          the boys came, did what they had to do
          mundane bravery, everyday courage
lance corporal said “just a hunk of metal
poor workmanship” “slave labour”
added the captain, pipe flaring red
          they dragged me from the ruins
          my leg was broken, but I would live 
          those that saved me did not see out the week
the war finished – VE Day, VJ Day
life failed to ignite, no passion it seemed
brain something or other, quacked the doc


          ‘Bulldog’ – a tugboat reaches the lock
          so, I decide to wait, avoid the do-gooders
          tumble down of water rushing in my ears

her lover died, a hero they say
so the enemy are not only evil
they are also the makers of heroes
          I took her back, it was the moral action
          their child became our child, an only child
          who did not understand why I hated her
at five, she held my hand when I cried
called me papa; at ten she spilt my whisky glass
and I broke her arm, I just lashed out
          at thirteen, I divorced her mother
          told her she was not my child
          truth is always best; she scratched my face
at thirty, her own children find me difficult
they call me Papa Mike; at forty she told me
“I forgive you, but I will never forget”

          tumble down of water rushing to the ear
          nineteen eighty three, gulls soar and dive
          stood on the edge of Richmond lock and weir

tumbling, rushing, it became easier to drift 
my ex-wife died, her daughter banned me 
from the funeral - forgive, not forget
          if only that bomb had been better made
          I would now be one of the remembered
          a casualty of war, an innocent man
but now, all I want is to forget, and be forgotten
forgiveness gives me nothing except pain
not even that anymore, simply numbness

          ‘Bulldog’ did drag me out, but the sweet
          kiss of breath went unheeded
          my time I guess, I had hoped for drama
some meaning, some blinding light
but all I felt was a sense of puzzlement
why had I not done this way back when

©Trevor Maynard, 2015, from Grey Sun, Dark Moon


PRESS RELEASE – GREY SUN, DARK MOON, a new collection of poetry by Trevor Maynard
 
Publication Date: September 14, 2015, Amazon $19.99/£14.99
Contact: Trevor Maynard, poetry@trevormaynard.com
Website: www.trevormaynard.com
Press copies: Available on request in .pdf or paperback
 
Synopsis
Taking us from Sunrise, through Morning, then Later, into Dusk, and concluding with Night, this collection of poetry hovers in the shadows of melancholy, occasionally rising to joy, often falling to darkness; an intimate study of the human condition. “Trevor Maynard combines complicated thematic material and unites fractured images with a sure hand” (The Stage)
 
Details
The book consists of sixty-five poems divided into five chapters, written on or before 2015, with an appendix of author’s notes on ten of the poems, an index of first lines, details of the author’s previous works, KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON (2012) and LOVE, DEATH AND THE WAR ON TERROR (2009).
 
The Chapters
SUNRISE, new life, the growing of awareness, the innocence of love
MORNING, change, the first half of life, time passes
LATER, the afternoon of existence, the coming of old age, the nature of being
DUSK, man in society, the violence of politics, the place of Man in Nature
NIGHT, the human condition, tragic narratives, the reality of love
 
Trevor Maynard biography
Born 1963, Trevor Maynard printed his first poetry pamphlets off an old Roneo machine and sold them to his work colleagues in the Civil Service. He soon returned to Higher Education, and wrote and directed his first play in 1986, before going to Royal Holloway College to read Theatre Studies and Dramatic Art. Over the next ten years he wrote and directed plays in London, Edinburgh and on tour. A collection of his one-act plays “FOUR TRUTHS” as well as the plays “GLASS” and “FROM PILLOW TO POST” have been published. In 2009, his first collection of poetry was released, LOVE, DEATH, AND THE WAR ON TERROR, inspired by his visit to the World Trade Centre in 1998 and 2004, as well as his birthday, 11th September, now hijacked by 9/11. Trevor also started the professional networking poetry group “Poetry, Review and Discuss” in LinkedIN (now 4,600 members) in 2009, and his second poetry collection KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON was published in 2012.
 
KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON (2012)
What a person writes is universal, because they themselves are human, and this can be words of ecstasy, of profound happiness; or it can be the depths of depression, the loss of love; or it can social commentary – putting the world to rights; or merely shooting the breeze – accessing the lexicon to have fun; but all in all, one thing poetry is, is emotional truth.
 
The Poetic Bond (www.thepoeticbond.com)
Trevor Maynard is editor of The Poetic Bond, an on-going series of poetry anthologies garnered from new media, social and professional networking, whose purpose is evolve organically a collection of poetry based on the emergent consensus of work submitted in a three month time window. To date, five anthologies have been published in paperback, with the fifth, published on 21 October 2015. Over 120 poets from 17 countries have been published, and in 2015, 802 poems were submitted, of which 56 made the final anthology.

 
 
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Press Release All the Babble of the Souk A Collection of Poetry by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Press Release All the Babble of the Souk published by Aquillrelle on Lulu. by Robin Ouzman Hislop.
 

robin2705
 
Review of All the Babble of the Souk by Richard Vallance
 
Richard Vallance, writer, author of Canadian Spirit Voices=
If “All the Babble of the Souk” is anything but memorable — as it surely is — it is so because of its sweeping portrayal of the tumultuous market that is humankind. The “babble” of this bazaar is that of all the markets in the world — irrespective of nation, language, culture or race or for that matter, at the symbolic level, of any manifestation of our nature, be it “good” or “evil”, which are not opposing psychological or spiritual states as all too many naïvely imagine, but rather their subtle blending in our psyche. There is no suggestion of the presence or absence of God or a “god”. It is irrelevant. There is just humanity.
 
The poems, mostly quasi free form, some of them highly reminiscent of haiku, range from very short to a few pages long. Except for one poem and one only, Scale Free, in which we come face to face with some of the most beautiful imagery in the entire collection, and I quote:
 
A cuckoo taunts
high in the mountain
where are you?

 
there is not a single question to be found in the rest of the book. All the rest of the poems consist only of statements, some of them brief, others rather too long for my taste and some even downright convoluted. When this approach to poetry composition is carried to its extreme, it can and sometimes does result in the overly prosaic. That is the only real quarrel I have with this collection. Fortunately, there are only only a handful of poems which are painfully prone to the prosaic. Among these are Mannequins, the whole series Maps 1,2,3,4, The Prisoners, Non Linear and in particular Rust (which reads more like a scientific tract than a poem), none of which have any real appeal to me.
 
The rest of the poems run from agreeable at the very least to the truly amazing. Among those poems agreeable to the mind and/or the ear I count: Passage, At the Party, Here Comes the Moon, Multiverse, The Pine at the Summit and Wind upon a River. Others like these will more or less please the reader. But as everyone knows, we all have our own preferences for the kinds of poetry we like. The poems which appeal more to one person appeal less to another. The aforementioned choices are merely my own.
 
Next come poems which display remarkable talent, such as: After Dylan on the Ninth Wave (which I for one particularly like), Africa North (haiku-like), A Witch for Halloween (in which we find some of the most striking chthonic imagery in the book), Core (commendable for its brevity, economy of verse & imagery), Entanglements (haiku-like), Sequence 1 & 2 (haiku-like) and Story of a Rose.
 
I have a marked preference for the poet’s haiku-like poems. Haiku have always strongly appealed to me. In fact, I myself, along with Robin Ouzman Hislop and so many other truly talented haijin, have composed a considerable number of poems of this nature, many of which were published in the print quarterly, Canadian Zen Haiku (2004-2010), which is now out of print. Brevity is the soul of wit, and indeed of the memorable. It is Robin Ouzman Hislop’ s more compact poems which please me the most. There are exceptions, poems which are not haiku-like or are somewhat lengthier. There are some truly memorable lines in these poems. For instance, we have:
 
from Africa North:
A winnowing canvass tosses corn
and
... as fireflies in the blazing day.
and finally
In the gloaming a solitary reaper reaps its shadow.
(Reminiscences of Wordsworth’ s, The Solitary Reaper, one of the most astonishingly beautiful poems in English.)
 
from After Dylan on the Ninth Wave, there are a considerable number of memorable lines, which you can explore for yourself. The poem is not quite up to Dylan Thomas… a very tough act to follow!
 
and from Core:
reaching my eye’s peninsula

sudden scene, solitary strand
 
All of the poems in this class pleased me a great deal.
 
Now we come to the downright brilliant poems, of which there are naturally only a few. I might as well cite them all. They are Scale Free ( a series of haiku-like lines & almost pure haiku), A Split Second Later’s Late, Laminations in Lacquer, Lucky Hat Day and Red Butterflies, all of which had a powerful psychological and spiritual impact on me. Here are just a few of the lines from these truly remarkable poems which really struck me, and I mean really —
 
from A Split Second Later’s Late:
… a serpent’s spit according to legend.
 
from Laminations in Lacquer, the gripping lines:
Fireworks like a diaphanous lithograph
print an emblazoned sky
on the craggy mountains of the night
where comets play at kites
& glistening the eerie beak hisses.

 
and from Red Butterflies, where we find some of the most highly inspired, truly imaginative lines:
but as a collage on shifting sands…

A sword brazed in a fire
that does not distinguish
between the battle
& the field.

 
I believe we can safely say that the poet has achieved a level of poetic style and content which can hardly disappoint. Some of the poems in in “All the Babble of the Souk” remind me of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. Perhaps the most striking feature of this volume is the poet’s portrayal of humanity, which deprives us of any escape from the darker, more insidious depths of our human condition. The most striking imagery in the entire collection forces itself on the least flattering trait of of our nature, our tendency towards — I might as well say it flat out — bestiality, which leaps to the fore in the poet’s all too frequent comparison between homo sapiens and apes (King Simian, seeking simian), gorillas, baboons and other fierce beasts of that ilk, all the way to neanderthals, Australopithecus and the odious nocturnal lupine, the proverbial werewolf. Lines such as: the hairless ape, go ape, going bananas… all mercilessly zero in on our ape-like nature bedeviling our s0-called civilized veneer.
 
There is also frequent reference to eating meat, and being eaten (we grow the meat we eat, those she didn’t eat alive, children simply to feed her, how they like human flesh, to be consumed by hell), all the way through to witchcraft and Zombie imagery. The dreadful presence of these creatures of the night inexorably lurks just beneath the thin veneer our blasé urbanity.
 
To cut to the quick, the most memorable qualities of Robin Ouzman Hislop’s poetic gifts are his penchant for economy of lines and the puissant imagery of the chthonic. Where these features dominate any poem, they impel it towards the nonpareil! Such poems soar. When it works, it works supremely well. As for the rest, there is much to please the reader.
 
Overall rating: 3.75/ 5
 
Richard Vallance

 
 
Richard Vallance
 
 
Richard Vallance, meta-linguist, ancient Greek & Mycenaean Linear B, home page: Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae, https://linearbknossosmycenae.wordpress.com
 
PINTEREST Boards: Mycenaean Linear B: Progressive Grammar & Vocabulary,
 
https://www.pinterest.com/vallance22/mycenaean-linear-b-progressive-grammar-and-vocabulary and, Knossos & Mycenae, sister civilizations, https://www.pinterest.com/vallance22/knossos-mycenae-sister-civilizations
 
Also poetry publisher, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire Friesen Press, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © August 2013. 35 illustrations in B & W. Author & Title Indexes. 257 pp. 315 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.
 
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