04/03/2023
The dead dance in Corvix, Lind’s compendium of collected verse, a corpus spanning decades, plumbing death and desire with a Romantic’s love of land and weather and the spirits that course through existence, digging to the heart of ritual and belief with the hunger of a seeker and the boldness of a blasphemer. Always he finds beauty in terror and terror in beauty. “I would make a fine meal, my sweet, /For you to peck at,” Lind writes, in the title poem, a paean to a woman who seems to have “a skein of blood upon thy ruby lips.” Elsewhere, he offers a new prologue to Macbeth and a celebration of M.R. James, a necromancer’s rite summoning the dead (the haunting, pared down “Evocation of a Spirit of Vengeance”), and evocations of lost or haunted places (“By Saddleworth Moor” imagines the spirit of its “bleak and barren” land to be a father who, driving the M62, lost his family in an accident).
One crucial throughline: Saturnalia, ancient gods, and the connection of the human, the divine, and Nature itself. Fitting those interests, the verse echoes back to Coleridge and Poe, in form and language, though Lind balances some proudly archaic language (“As wandered thou ’mong silver’d trees”) with the directly stated, especially in later works. “And yet the moment when I succumbed / To the anaesthesia of life / Eludes me,” Lind writes in the standout “The Constant Watch,” a consideration of the diminishment, over decades, of the intensity with which one feels.
Death, of course, has an erotic charge in these rich, rewarding poems, as do the acts of creation that led to this world. That powers the keystone work “Priapus,” a declarative piece in the voice of “Pan” or God or whatever name one might choose—in one of many illuminating notes, Lind calls it “the expression of the ‘Primal Will to Be.’” The notes and essays are clear-eyed yet surprising, warm yet provocative, setting down an independent mind’s understanding of Nature, poetry, witchcraft, Paganism, and the soul itself.
Takeaway: Evocative poems, inspired by the Romantics, of ancient gods, haunted lands, and the erotic charge of death.
Great for fans of: Donald Wandrei, Kathryn Hinds.
Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
★ 2022-02-25
Mythology, mayhem, and the macabre roil this set of haunting poems.
Lind includes some 55 pieces written over 35 years, many of them infused with self-consciously archaic language and themes. His earlier poems have a highly rhetorical sensibility, as in the phallic anthem “Priapus”: “With what shall ye compare my hideous strength, / Mere Man? / With the night-black bull that rears and spits / In its cloven lust?” His middle-period poems often deploy a singsong style whose seeming simplicity and artlessness disturbingly highlight sinister, sometimes-violent content, as in “The Pretty Magpie”: “Once I loved a little dog, / A golden spaniel bitch, / They came and shot it all to death / And left it in a ditch.” His late period casts poems in an idiom that’s more modern and impressionistic in its continued treatment of fraught, primal material, as in “The First and the Last.” He also offers a long adaptation of the Icelandic saga of Gunnar and Hallgerður, about a woman who brings her husband nothing but trouble; it’s a riveting, gore-spattered epic suffused with eerie Nordic hallucination: “And woven into her straggled hair, / The bones of children / That rattled and clinked in the wind.” Lind’s poems feature strong narratives, bold voices, and evocative imagery that’s besotted by both Eros and Thanatos, as in the title poem, a gothic imagining of a crowlike lover that’s an inspired mashup of the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire: “I am but carrion for your clever mouth / And quick, sharp fingers that rake and rack.” Overall, this collection is a great read for those who like hotblooded verse.
Old-school poetry with grand themes and darkly romantic execution.
