Perverted Vocabulary
Like much of There is No Year, this passage is full-blown weird and derivative all at once. But it feels unlike anything else being written. It’s as if by borrowing the mirror-writing so explicitly, plus indulging in this endless-feeling list of dead celebrities, plus the sort of mystery-novel unwrapping of the package’s multiple boxes to reveal the stack of pictures, Butler ramps up a technique of copying to such a degree that you get a kind of onslaught of images, an overwhelming, abundant and kind of grotesque set of images. At points, There is No Year mimics the look-away, inevitable and perpetual horror of gore films, and the thrill of those films too, a fraught pleasure and fascination with death.
Colin Herd reviews Blake Butler‘s There is No Year.
The Cinder Storm of Language
In an ever-changing world, death’s the one thing you can rely on, that won’t let you down. All through Drawing In Ash Stone is drawn to this theme, haunted by mortality and yet fascinated by it, he returns again and again – the Holocaust, the Black Death, cholera epidemics, suicided writers. Walter Benjamin stricken and outdone by the sun and his imagined pursuers on a mountain pass, Montaigne fleeing the plague, the body of Walser lying in the snow. Mortality is there in the fatalism of ‘Chopin In Scotland’ (“the doctors last conspiratorial whisper”), in ‘The Fears of Charles Baudelaire’, “my cloak the broom / sweeping me down every spiral staircase / and out under the dripping ironwork / of days” (the poet fantasising which way he will die and we the audience knowing that he does not see what’s coming), in the defiant helplessness of “climbers darkly frozen, all of us / pinned on the ice wall of history / unable to go forward, unable to go back / but signalling.” It watches us all the time while we only catch glimpses of it, “the discreet surveillance / of death.”
Darran Anderson reviews Will Stone‘s poetry collection Drawing In Ash.