Robert Dassanowsky
Soft Mayhem

November 2010. 40 pp. ISBN-13 978-3-901993-30-5 (= PSPS 2)
£6.00 (+ 1.00 p&p), €6.00 (+ 1.00 p&p), US$ 8.50 (+ 1.50 p&p)
 

"In these collected meditations on change that rip apart what we imagine to be 'order' Dassanowsky performs his trademarklinguistic magic, penetrating everything from light to perspective, from personal death to the death of a civilization,from metaphysical trauma to transfiguration. In his hands the destruction of the past transforms into the creative,life-affirming breath of the future. "Centuries are my father", writes this prescient poet, "I am the amnesiac". But littleis left unnoticed or forgotten by the visionary Dassanowsky, who has about him both the dreamer and the theorist, whose keeneye infiltrates everything it sees. "I am in the dark of man", he writes, "standing in the sunlight". And so lucky for usthat he is."

Ally Acker


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Excerpt from Soft Mayhem

Chopin Nocturne No. 3
 
Poland is a lace drape
a window in a train car
en route to the west

Fingered by children and
kid gloved hands there is
a shredding, yellowing, but the
officer pulls it aside

Windows are cleaned, broken
replaced, left dirty, cleaned again
the lace finally tatters
is pulled off, lost or burned

The window, now milky
glares like the mad eye
of the lost in the
burning sun, the icy night

A new lace replaces the old

Moved by the wind again
throwing long interrupted
shadows across faces that
sway to find the cultured shade

En route to the west
to the west
it flutters in imitation of itself.


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