223 pages, Kindle edition
Review by Marc Nash
A combination of short aphoristic poems,
longer verse and dialogues, I'm unsure how to categorise Heavy Bags of Soul, which I
suspect is the author's intent. The writing is a blend of spirituality, the new
physics and self-helpisms. Its aim is, I assume, contemplative, not to say
meditative. Are you supposed to read it in small bite-sized chunks, or as I
did, plough on through like a conventional book? Certainly there is no
narrative thrust, no real progression to propel the reader through. I suspect
the author's final words on the back of the book, "what you do next, is up
to you" is a challenge he throws down to the reader. Use this book how you
will.
With so many poems, the quality is almost
inevitably uneven. On the one hand, you have the teenager's scrawl of "The
Moment Of The NOne" - "Preach to me bitch/and cream me peach",
but then you have a fine sentiment in a poem like "The Sun Part 1" -
it (the sun) throws you under the ocean of surrender/while you wait for a
door,/puts its mouth against all that is you/ and breathes". "Elle
Chante" is a poem written entirely in French with no translation offered,
while "Travels of Empathy" I believe would make rather a good song
because of its assonances. And this again enhances the feeling that this is a
book of pieces and fragments rather than a whole. The archaeologist discovered
shard of pottery, from which the imagination strives to complete the full urn.
The dialogues are mainly catechisms and
dialectics between science and religion, but the voices are disembodied rather
than fleshed characters, which tends to leave the reader outside looking in.
The ideas under discussion are indubitably fascinating, but in some places,
such as "Drop Dead Zen", the intellect is not worn lightly, but
displayed with a hint of peacock finery. Yet in other places the ideas are
batted about in a hip, diffident manner, so that they are not really
foregrounded with sufficient emphasis so as to be able to grapple with them.
There is a quantum feel to some of the writing; whereby it appears to be meditatively
deep and yet also contemporaneously concerned with the surface and disposable
as we move on to the next hip thing. "Fire Under The Ass" for
example, manages to wrap "The Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly's" vibe
into the heightened tones of a spiritual quest.
If you're aiming to be non-linear, and I
believe the author is here, through his echoes of the quantum and the fractal,
then the layout of the words on the page ought perhaps to reflect this. If
you're attempting to be radical and to strip away conventional notions, then
you have to go down to the DNA level of literature. This was still poems and
prose dialogue, obeying and conforming to how we perceive these forms to be
represented. This is a brave stab at redefining the literary, but I think if
founders on its own fundamentals. It operates at the lexeme level, when it may
need to think about alphabets and letters.
There's a chapter called
"Kundalini" which is the strongest, most coherent one, I feel. Yet I
think ultimately it's a litmus test chapter as to what a reader might make of
this book. I know what kundalini is, I could appreciate the concepts grouped
under the chapter heading. But if you don't already know what kundalini is, I
can't imagine that without Wikipedia open constantly, you'd have much of a clue
what it was all about and what touchstones it was sparking off.
But I don't want to give the impression
that the writing is without merit. It is stimulating, crafts language expertly
and makes the reader consider the content, which can never be a bad thing. It's
more a question of a review trying to provide a way in for the reader to help
them decide. I think at least for me, this book became a series of sotto
whispered calls to action, but I couldn't be certain what action I was being roused
to. Yet in appealing to the individual self, there is a particular need to
appeal to the emotional self and it is this emotional level that is missing
from these aphoristic calls. I don't want to criticise, I want to understand. Some great individual shards, but I'm missing
the idea of the whole pot in its entirety.
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