Gifts of the Dark
by Simon Bowden
with cover images by Jan Roe
reviewed here
by John Mole in London Grip
reviewed in full below
by John Foster
reviewed in the current printing by Philip Gross, John Foster, Martyn Crucefix, Tamar Yoseloff, Myra Schneider, John Mole, Katherine Gallagher, Julian Bishop and Kevin Maynard
Now reviewed in SOUTH69 by Peter Keeble (see full review below)
I was glad to read this careful tracking of the way through that sleepless edgeland between light and dark … into a new sense of meaning refreshed, in ways our language can’t contain.
Poet and past T S Eliot Prize-winner, Philip Gross
Gifts of the Dark
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In the beginning ...
The book starts with a very simple poem, outlining a physical situation.
Let’s be clear what’s going on!After that, the poems balance each other from left to right hand page. Generally the right hand page describes an intense human experience. The left hand page, in italics, is often a metaphorical reflection of the other.
Sometimes the two poems balance each other emotionally,
the light and the dark. -
Gifts of the Dark
There is a sense that every experience happens twice – the Being and the puzzling Reflection.
It’s our human condition to wander between the two states.Darkness itself becomes a metaphor – theme for a set of variations, and a way to explore
isolation, containment and one-ness.No matter how we are physically challenged, our experience remains relative – seeking to make each second of existence more satisfactory than the previous one.
How do we come out of a brush with death?
Will it affect our ability to embrace life and love?
About the author
Simon Bowden has come from the high-pressure world of news and current affairs broadcasting. In retirement he has turned to creative writing to try to pin down some emotional truths, to match the increasingly rare factual truth of good journalism.
Brought up as an atheist from a young age, he is seeking ways to replace the moral structure of religion and the sense of connection between humans and the cosmos that we have lost.
He has had poems published by the Fondazione San Giorgio, the e-magazine Allegro and been commended in the Ver Poets open competition. He has also won several prizes for short prose fiction from Verulam Writers.
Simon loves to stalk the border between prose and poetry, where sound, rational common sense can come unstuck.
Launched!
We are proud to say that the launch event (see here) went superbly well, where we sold several copies.
Congratulations to Simon on a very successful launch and a truly inspirational chapbook of poetry.
DROWNING IN LIGHT
BAFTA award-winning John Foster reviews Gifts of the Dark …
These poems had a huge impact on me as I weaved my way through this debut chapbook. As a cancer survivor, I wanted to absorb every image and metaphor, all the dancing nuances and dark shadowy prose. Simon Bowden captures the entire experience of having cancer and being scared witless. All the senses play like an orchestra across the body as you lie waiting to see what comes. A body flowing on the ‘blood river.’ Not that this volume is at all grim or dark, and most certainly without self-pity. It is exciting work. There is a lightness of touch to the proceedings and an ability to draw us in through narrative whilst avoiding plot.
The poems are highly readable and very accessible. In this sense, the volume is quite traditional, even conventional. These are solid, well-crafted pieces of work, but within this frame are quite innovative and experimental. The illness is alluded to and through metaphor powerfully yet obliquely described. What I liked best was the overwhelming impressionism in the poems which plays with your senses, even your reality. The imagery is dauntingly beautiful and the use of colour surprising, sometimes shocking, but always in a good way. The descriptive and atmospheric power of these poems is at times phenomenal.
The poems are very visual and quite filmic, with the images jumping out at the reader, or just simmering there on the page. The poems convey a world of dark corridors, silent surgeries, operating theatres, wards, rooms. Bowden spent many dawns staring out of his window looking out over Poole Harbour, awake in the early hours of darkness, watching the light rise. There is a strong impression of darkness and light, a shadowy world. Yet as the poems progress another world opens up, that of nature and countryside as the healing process begins. Many of these nature descriptions are deeply evocative.
One element that seems surprisingly missing is these highly descriptive poems is the occasional mention of sound – ‘howling wind’ is one, ‘fizzled’ another, but they are rare and quite literal. Sound can do a lot for a piece of writing, provide another of the senses and powerfully evoke and define space as well as suggesting emotion. Silence, deep silence, in these poems is the dominating sound, but missing seem to be those echoey hospital sounds and those haunting evocations from landscapes and seascapes.
There is a kind of instilled sense of fear in the material of the poems, but not felt as strongly as expected. It seems to be assumed in the moments of early waking in the dark and the waiting, the endless waiting. Yet the underlying fear, indeed stark terror, of what might happen is my lingering memory of those terrible days. In these poems this is implied rather than overtly dramatised. Instead surreal nightmarish images emerge expressing the psychological mania of the patient lying silently in a hospital bed:
In the Paris sewers
I lug my own corpse,
pursued forever
by a mad policeman
The corpse stirs, asks,
Will we be all right?
Which as an expression of deep-rooted fear is far more pungent than a straight description and produces a moment of neurotic horrific imagery which leaps out at the reader. An entirely brilliant moment in this outstanding collection.
This volume of poems if beautifully produced by the relatively new publisher Dithering Chaps. The cover is particularly impressive with a design by Jan Roe.
Exceptional work of great achievement and, as a debut volume, even greater promise. Simon Bowden might be a ‘Dorset poet’ but the tensions and traumas he conveys are universal.
Highly recommended.
Gifts of the Dark reviewed by Peter Keeble in SOUTH69
This early offering from Dithering Chaps press is a consistent collection of thirty-two poems appearing alternately under two headings: Reflections and Entering the Dark. They are meditations on the poet’s treatment for a tumour of the tongue and they play obsessively with darkness and light, cosmology, nothingness, naming, language and the tongue. This is fruitful and the repetitiveness of these themes works cumulatively, making the collection more than the sum of its individual poems.
The opening poem, ‘This is Not a Poem’, sets up the scene for what follows, telling us that the poet will for some months be unable ‘to eat,/ to swallow to speak’. He wakes early in the morning and in a beautifully ambiguous phrase,
‘contemplated the gift of life/ without light.’
Many of the poem titles have a biblical, or perhaps life cycle, ring and plot the hospitalization and return home sequentially: ‘Beginning’, ‘First Day’, ‘When There is Nothing’, ‘Darkness’, ‘An End’. Others break out of this self-absorption while echoing the collection’s themes. ‘Chinese Poet’ is a superb celebration of a culture’s spare poetry which nonetheless is compared to a fragrant cup passed ‘over the white pages of years….’ while another evokes a firework display.
Elsewhere there is ‘a skull speaking stones’, ‘humans/ and slave machines’, ‘electric Alps of a hospital bed’, ‘the scenery of autumn’ that ‘drags on pulleys/ in a black and white film’. And all the time the poet returns to his wordless world, so often contemplating existence alone in the early morning light, a period that he compares in a spectacular piece of distancing, to a film.
This collection contemplates the mysteries of existence and life. The final lines of ‘Yoga’ are a fine example of this:
‘Mutter not my will … today/ but thine… for
others…/ not knowing what it means’.