Des Lewis will be 77 years old on 18 January 2025
Those who have read these episodic brainstorming reviews of mine must know they are very personal — rough-shod and spontaneous. Synchronicity and anagram mixed. I know they are not professional, never potentially publishable other than in the madness of my head, but I do hope they show grains of dark truth and cosmic panache.
These Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews were founded in 2008.
‘What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’ — THE SINGING DETECTIVE
“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare
To any current genre author I have reviewed before — if you have a new story recently published or soon to be published in a collection or anthology, you may have a review by me of the story that also showcases where it is published. See HERE. (This is because I am no longer well enough to review as many books as I once did.)
Fresh Fictions, free to read HERE.
No AI input in preparation of my texts whatsoever.
THE NEW NONSCENIC
Photos here: https://conezero.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/d-f-lewis-recent-photos-1/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
Without Her
YOU SANG THEM ALL AWAY
“: a release.”
It as if I have been pent up by all manner of misunderstanding from reading this author as part of a germinating gestalt, if there can be such a thing! And now I am trapped as well as released: a Paradox. This delightfully old-fashioned sonnet is not old-fashioned at all, it is fashioned anew. The ability of the ‘without her’ (not having her anymore or simply being outside of her, with all that the latter entails?) — the ghosts she sang away, the ghosts of you. Kept you quiet or made you noisy? A sonnet that is endlessly interpretable.
ENCUMBERED BY THE NOON TODAY
I feel this sonnet was written, in 2014, perfectly for today and its troubled times, but here as tenderly assuaged by ‘your’ face on the pillow. In today’s “winter light”.
INNER SKIES
“All held within, a habit understands.”
Well, this is surely the perfect rhyming sonnet. It seems just to flow as if it has been written forever and learnt in schools for generations, a love elegy with a pent up destruction alleged from within it.
YOUR ESSENCE OF COMPLEXITY
“Your personal perfume of autumn cold,
And winter warmth,…”
It may be the passion of the real-time moment, but this unrequited sonnet is possibly the most moving sonnet I have ever read. I certainly can’t remember a greater sonnet. ‘Sonnet’ as a little sound? A little sound of lost love, made large.
SHE LOVED THE NIGHT AND SHE MIGHT LOVE IT STILL
“At the bursting of the frost, if given time,”
The Favourite poem so far. Not a sonnet.
(4 Feb 2015) if given time!
Queen Anne’s Quebec Expedition?
THE HERITAGE OF ICE AND AUTUMN GLASS
“. If you see
These minor joys “
It is the space that measures already. A hauntingly stoical poem about the woman who left the narrative poet. Amid nature and its accoutrements, it seems rather a poignant mutual loss.
(Tuesday, February 3, 2015)
EVERYTHING I NEED RIGHT NOW, TO LIVE
“The moon has burst and lies, a broken leer,
Hollow on the rooftops.”
Another remarkable poem, reminding me of ones I studied at school and university, possibly more enjoyable than ever I found with those poems studied during the 1960s. This message to WRITE by an ex in unrequited poetic language, is a wonderful paradox. Writing IS doing other, better things.
THE LIES OF HAPPY DREAMS
“In dreams, you pause to speak with me a while”
This unrequited sonnet makes me think there is artful irony lurking somewhere in this book, as well as the perfectly honed and honest poetry.
“Of mask and costume, every stage-lit guise”
Cross-referenced after ten minutes with the poem here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/here-i-am-there-you-are-where-were-we-tom-disch/#comment-14859
WITH EACH UNSPOKEN STORM
A sonnet of a losing love’s audit trail being similar to that from Summer to Autumn. Not Fall, I note, but your lover’s ‘equinoctial stare’. Hauntingly oblique in that final irony. Whatever the perceived resentments involved. Autumn is beautiful, too, I say. Even Winter.
I REMEMBER LOVE
A short anguished summoning of a love once felt. And if felt, still existing as love, even if it is simply one side summoning the other side’s love from the frozen past, thus melting it?
WITHOUT YOU
“Without your speaking half, I am adrift”
A very moving sonnet on losing one’s better half…
SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 2014
“Not one of them was you,”
It is always good to take long slow bites at this book of poems, poignant and unrequited.
BIRTHDAY SONNET
“, confetti on the floor
Of some glass ballroom where the spotted walls
No longer swirl with dancing,”
Poignant one-sided unrequitedness after erstwhile mutual requiting.
This book should be read by every one who was once part of an item that has since broken up. An assumption that reduces its potential audience?
Just cross-referenced this Dillon with Disch here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/here-i-am-there-you-are-where-were-we-tom-disch/#comment-15478
Cross-referenced again: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/here-i-am-there-you-are-where-were-we-tom-disch/#comment-15670
You Can’t Be Serious!
.
EXPERIMENTAL DECADENCE
Written on an April First, this predator and prey sonnet, one where a tongue is snatched from a cheek by fangs. Wasn’t there a film with Boris Karloff called The Serpent?
No, apparently! But I could have sworn…
Ah, the film I was thinking of was The Reptile, a Hammer Film, and no Boris Karloff!
What strange power made her half woman – half snake?
BUT DOCTOR, YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS
“Rubied vials of reptile genes —“
You can’t make it up! Mistakes that come to constructive fruition in the art of Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing! A horror sonnet to morph for!
ABOMINATION CORN
…as opposed to the Alien sort? A cross between another aesthetic horror sonnet and something genuinely horrific: climate change?
“Such leering, scything terrors…”
NEVER ONE PIP
A tantalising pollination of the mind.
XYLOTOMOUS XENOGENESIS
A work that is set captivate at precisely now at around 5 to 3 on 8 July 2019.
BLANK VERSE AUTOPILOT
“As we might plead for serpents of Saigon”
A sort of aversion-therapy in autonomous writing, giving snakes legs like us.
A most frightening thing, when first filling words into a blank.
DID YOU THINK YOU COULD HIDE IN THE MIRROR?
“May all the rubied leeches of your brood,
Steeped in the septic fluids of their sire,
Blacken in the hot light,…”
One of those special poems. Flowing with fury, speaking to those we want to make better than us.
It seems like it’s talking like fathers teaching their sons, while the fathers are guilty, too.
Whether or not I think that because I have long been co-reviewing this book, I can now never know,
LINES FROM A SUPPRESSED EDITORIAL, 1827
“Clothing is the source of Lust.”
An appetising theme and variations on the above thought, à la Alexander Pope, Andrew Marvell?
But what happened in 1827? (A year too late for those poets.)
Just chosen at random: Romanian inventor Petrache Poenaru receives a French patent, for the invention of the first fountain pen with a replaceable ink cartridge.
Englishman John Walker invents the first friction match, which he names Lucifer.
And Beethoven died.
NO FRIEND OF MINE
.
PARALYSIS
A sonnet where the older person has stoicism about life and time, while the younger one endures an impatience of despair. Can stoicism come in short spurts? Only an old person will fully understand this work, I guess. I wonder how old the poet is?
Heatwave here in the real-time of 2019 in UK for last few days…
ONE DETAIL DEFINES THE WHOLE
“sweating”
PERSPECTIVE
“sweating”
Many memorable lines, too, in these two fine and continuously re-readable poems.
One detail defines the whole seems a prefect sentiment for my real-time reviewing!
and
PERSPECTIVE
is possibly the finest poem (another sonnet) describing the art of writing poetry.
I would quote the whole work, if given free rein, as there are too many great quotes to choose from, so just one detail: “I write”
SLAMMING DOORS
I hope I shall be forgiven for quoting the last two lines of this adroitly provocative sonnet, as they seem personally relevant somehow to this real-time review, as if directly addressed to it, a preternatural prophecy that such an address would one day be needed—
“Yet I would rather fail in my own dreams
Than gain success in borrowed silks of yours.”
In January 2015 when this sonnet was seemingly written, I was soon to be diagnosed with prostate cancer, later treated by radiotherapy. So, I may not even have been here to have seen that couplet, had I not gone to the doctor early enough. I seemed to have cut it very fine, in any event! Skating on thin ice, as it were. Ice and autumn glass.
THE CHALLENGE OF A STARK AESTHETIC CHOICE
A paean to the sonnet as the perfect form of most resistance – against the crumbling world around us.
Arguably, irrespective of considerations of the pecking order of poetic forms, this is a candidate for being the most perfect sonnet in competition with other sonnets, old and new and as yet unwritten. It is personally and universally honed.
Donne-like.
Can one say “most perfect”? Well, I just did.
I am beginning to think I was preternaturally induced somehow to choose this book for my style of reviewing processes.
PS: The collective noun for sonnets that I invented when writing my own sonnets in the 1960s: A ‘rack’ of sonnets.
HANG ON FOR NOW
“Heed the pause, the heartbeat of this time,’
I cannot continue describing the icily strict, but somehow emotional, adeptness of each sonnet. This one on death as a sporadic requirement,
You must take what I am likely to say about these sonnets as read. Or at least read the sonnets themselves yourselves.
Do we have here the new Donne? I remember being inspired by the Donne sonnets, well, most of his poems, when in my twenties. I later went on to his sermons.
I cannot keep explaining why I particularly admire and appreciate these poems, but I shall now simply list their titles as I read them, unless I pick up something that stands out from things that already stand out. Rest assured, though, that I am utterly confident they will continue to be great poems: in the main, tight, provocative metaphysical delights, sometimes with an edge of a chip on the shoulder or a grievance or witty and/or stolid stoicism, but somehow all rich with the reader’s sense of a soul residing within, often a vulnerable soul, at that.
DREAMED IN A COLDER BED
UNCRIPPLED BY IDOLATRY
THE SLOW DEAD CENTRE
“As a child, of course, you ran from parents,”
A corollary with my latest Rasnic Tem reviews. And Owen Booth.
Could easily have fulfilled as an entry in Tem’s Book of Days (https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/book-of-days-steve-rasnic-tem/)
A sonnet with two lines lopped out? That slow dead hiatus.
Just cross-referenced this book with the Nogle here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/08/02/vastarien-a-literary-journal-vol-2-no-2/#comment-16717
NO EFFECT
A sonnet with some most memorable lines.
Poetry as a continued shriving.
COULD SOMEONE ELSE READ THIS FOR ME…?
HOLLOW PUPPET-FLAILING
“…like a cretin with a cut.”
A sonnet as a treatment of what I happen to be reading at the moment, i.e. Evenson’s cleaver novel LAST DAYS, as peppered with Ligotti and TS Eliot.
I intend to read the rest of this poetry book outside the scope of this site’s real-time reviewing, I am looking forward to reading it all, including a long poem I have glimpsed later in the book entitled IN THE VALLEY OF THE NIGHT-FORMS. I suspect in my preternatural gut that it is a classic.
“You didn’t appear and yet you were present, if only in the feeling of missed connections.” – Helen Tookey
end
I loved the rest of the book, but I ceased my public reviews because nobody seemed interested or encouraged to be interested at the time in this review.