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 first poem I more that just infer was written when the poet was thirteen in 1976. With her own (or my) inferred imaginings of a more ‘alien tone’ felt about to ricochet this poet who is thought (or she thought) already to be (in) her own intended sphere, albeit a spinning one?
The five-line poem dated January 9th 1977 is defiant and infinite, but it hardly fills a single page let alone all the pages as promised to her real-time self, as well as, implicitly, to her future self, even to us when we finally read it today. Still any promises we make to future ages is hedged around with many considerations of each Proustian self of ‘you’ that I anticipate the rest of this book will explore with an open spirit, using blood disguised as ink…
LINES
An engaging modern version, without trammelling tradition, of 18th century verse as a defiant paean to poets. With ominous undercurrents that mere defiance may not be all she needs. In the rat race of future life?
February 18th 1977
“To dream, to dream, an atmosphere so real”
An exquisite premonition of a co-vivid dream when scrying her Georgian writing slope for Brontës.
March 7th 1977
“I may find truth, I may find love
But what are these to space above?”
A disarmingly simple poem with a strict rhyming scheme, that gives the certainty of the rhythms of life as a mortal speck in space, but somehow, it engagingly gives me the counterintuitively positive hope of the ‘truth’, as well as of life’s other ingredients, to be garnered — of an eventual steady-state Null Immortalis? A glory and a curse, in an unlikely synergy?
Then an exquisite “Elusive Février has gone” applying exactly equally today in March as it did that March day in 1977.
21st March 1977
A beautiful poem in the Romantic tradition, where our love as one of many alien or hidden emotions about the Nature around and within us outdoes the blessings and potential ills of love between us.
March 31st 1977
The first quintain of grey day and storm seems slightly trite but that turns out, in hindsight, as a foil to the inspirational treating of infinity and night in the second.
Helped by the interesting rhyming and assonance of the regular irregular length of lines.
May 6th 1977
A moving and harshly self-condemnatory incantation – seeking the healing gestalt across the gulf. As I do even today, reaching back to the intrinsic Jungian memories within such literature, from youth — to an old age that is at the eventual gateway of escape, from the unworthy self towards a faith in a better one.
May 16th 1977
“When I am gone, the universe
Will lose its mystery;”
An Ode to Intimations of Mortality, with a perfect last line, probably, without hyperbole, in its context, the best last line in any poem I’ve ever read.
May 26th 1977
“Breathing, like west winds in winter, grows short:
An end to man’s order, an end to his thought.”
A sensory vision of half-moonlight and a glen, a creative diminuendo that prophesies our times today. A lethargy that doubles as a reconciliation. A circling back to beginnings within our ends. Possibly the strongest poem so far, ironically, in chronology of being written, outdoing any inherent diminuendo. Did you know that?
Quite coincidentally, a regular on-line poetry discussion group in which I participate has independently chosen this week TO A WREATH OF SNOW by Emily Brontë that I believe was written when she was a teenager.
June 8th 1977
My reading, as I have just done, and now publicly empiricalling this poem, as I often do with other works I deal with in my real-time, is my half hour well spent, and this poem expresses for me exactly how I feel about life, even when older, and gives me new openings to such thoughts by this wise young person from many years ago….
JUNE 9th 1977
“Never More:”
A mature poem instinctively beyond the poet’s years, as if, for me, blocking an earlier romantic crush with the then premonition of a NEMOnymous side of a Poe or Verne, both of whom once collaborated beyond “Leagues of ocean”….
October 13th 1977
The maker of this poem, the maker of this maker, and how this is implicated in facing the final void, a blend of hope and despair, the art of Art as the art of timeless healing. Art without your heart still beats on itself. While dead you lie. Fame outlasts you, but is futility our only fate on a planet that now expires! Doth the maker still sit outside it? Or the maker’s maker.
Seriously, a major poem. With implications it possibly did not know it was writing in the real-time of writing it…
October 26th 1977
Even at such a tender, if an (ostensibly) poetically mature, age, this poet already fears “the tree of youth is blighted” !
This review will now continue here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/tamar-yellin/