Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Lary Timewell's tones employed as loss (2013)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Lary Timewell's tones employed as loss (2013) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

An exciting Poetry Chapbook, avant-garde poetry bangs in the dance. Lary Timewell finds himself in Vancouver after living for 25 years in Fukushima. He is one of the co-founders and publisher of Tsunami Editions press, currently publishing through the venture obvious epiphanies press.

The Poetry Chapbook begins with a citation by Rosemary [sic] Waldrop, “If we could just go on walking through these woods” sets the stage for high camp and trepidation in a story of love lost. A new treatise on the twisted cultural landscape, North America.

This poetry is blow speak. Bullet line delivery within a poetic prose type style, it is a new post-modern twist on poetic form. Inconsistent capitalization and punctuation in a violent milieu that protests, tones employed as loss weaves the story of love lost/conflicted love with the love of poetry that saves. The two themes are interwoven in the theater of the absurd that includes inane humour mixed with masculine imagery/energy not unlike someone shouting at a wall. “I-vow-my troth recurring dream/hung on for dear laugh, went eventually/belly dancing out of the room, much to the dismay of/poets in their/heated nests”; “waiting in the envelope of the cave/ like chloroformed squirrel, ecstatic”; “the name of your country is not America. Please/ to be stopping sending Coco-Puffs to Rumania”; “the sky swallowing the garage, sap” and “just more earthworms slathered in agnostic marmalade; the chanting”.

Juxtaposed with the theme of poetry/salvation is the theme of love lost and/or conflicted love, “out on the highway, toss milky sandals/ from the salmon-pink bedspread where “I”/ loves “you” and even the far blue/ hills understand it is only a dream” and “I’m just another/ born loser in/ an ordinary act/ of desperation/ the awkward/ decisive punch/ line having/ some fun at/ the expense of/ the expansive/ (homesick or assimilated)/ how/ now”.

Interspersed throughout the long poem the word Poetry appears at the left hand margin with a series of lines begun by a colon.

“Poetry        : throat-red staccato under stucco archway
                      : bickering microbes in the blood
                      : mold-speckled tent pitched in the topography of dream
                      : empathic accidents out to the radius of the real world
                      : gauge of the exchange
                      : the electronic distance between speech & song
                      : the asynchronous knowledge of clues that hold their breath
                      : the mannequin and his young brood
                      : shopping for subliminals in the general store
                      : gleaning the meaning of a depot along the highway
                      : the real landscape of a fictional street
                      : the sound a baby deity makes
                      : the oxygen of music out the open window
                      : the disappearing episode
                      : hands that make wings
                      : an echo losing insistence
                      : exhalation of the unthinkable
                      : baroque repertoire of the mimic in the mirror
                      : obituary vernacular of fastidious trivia“

In a celebration of the written form of poetry, “The path is the poem overgrown, each letter/ an illuminated leaf inscribed, living/ excursion of the swans one notices and stops,/ feeling an urge to be/ similarly taken away, lifted up into/ the sweet capsule of a paragraph/ of unselfconscious cloud. Ragged din, see/ and hear through walls of/ chacun a son gout thunder/ kicking out in knowledge and joy. Alas,“

In the play with language, the dislocated images that lends a punch drawn feel, the imaginative definitions of the word Poetry are an exhaustive constant celebration and not without angst. That poetry could be so evocative is at once spellbinding and full of light.

In the exploration of the defining poetry is the defining Poet. Reading good poetry is a wonderment, that often makes this Writer think in tangents about the relation of the Poet to their writing and the act of writing. How the education of the Poet, intellect and life experience interacts with the Poet’s soul essence, the rhythm of the soul and the Muse to produce fantastical works.

tones employed as loss, a study in absurdist poetry, lightening and light.