June 13, 2008

Trevor Calvert, Rarer and More Wonderful (Scrambler, 2008). 73 pages.

Broken into 4 sections, Rarer's pages move and build on each other forming something of a metaphysics by the book's last lines: " a redefinition of self somehow finally knowing the popular theory that time does not even exist and without it the universe makes sense again [. . . ]like a bee stinging its own back" (69).

The opening section, Struck Landscape, sets the tableau--lyricism, Foucault, automatons--for the literal Punch & Judy that follows it. Punch, ever the violent sadist, is on a search for meaning:

Punch is not
history . His
is the musical
cruelty of
duendé. His
wretched mirth
is his path
to god, with
which he
will someday
make a
murder
maybe his
own. (42)

The third section acts like a poetic attempt at a Keirkegaardian Either/Or statement, showing the limitations in various approaches to reality and existence, which of course sets up the eschatological final section, An Approach to Ending.