The Non Herein- by Michael Mc Aloran. A Review by Christopher Barnes

This is an ambitious group of poems of considerable formal dexterity.  An avant-garde tract of angst, night terrors, the quest for renewal and ultimate loss.  The poems churn upon themselves in echoes.  Half and distorted repetitions create unity across all of the poems which keeps the rhythm moving.

          “Tracing the night’s

          Parchment”.

And “Of the traces of –“are good examples.  The language and grammatical units disconnect and are often left uncompleted which de-familiarises our expectations of what words normally do.

          “Absent…we’ll

          …laughter till the lungs bleed dry of corrugated flowerings”. 

This enacts these poem’s themes concretely.  Crafted into the dissonance of the physical language, is a sense of breathlessness and even fear.   This is a series of poems of torture, mayhem, death and the realities of the body.  The careful honing of lines and verses and the tense economy used create a shape that brings to my mind the genre New Music.  Line endings and rhythms also create a sense of controlled and well-tested soundscapes.

          “Choke

         Of dust and of the

         Parched sun

         Of bled”.

These are difficult poems, ordinary perceptions are de-habituated.  We are in a place broken which is a frightening at-the-edge experience.  Though the end is a passing out, “Fading wishful fading ever knowing none of it”.

It does not feel like the end because of the circularity of these poem’s psychological and visual cat’s cradles.  The conscious voice in the set of poems could wake up at the beginning and start over.

The collection’s title holds within it its opposite ‘the herein’.  The dichotomy between the internal/external seems to suggest a constant search to find meaning, connecting the persona’s internal life to the world in an Existential vacuum, a voice in the wilderness,            

         “And the brutal fist

          Of the herein”, the poet adds, as well as the tension and confusion of verses such as,

          “Head non vast

          Non herein

          Scattered speeches of”, the central failed quest being to unite the two.

The first line “Into Echoing –“springs into action as ‘a shall we begin’, with the promise of the half-repetitions and turnings back that sustain these poem’s themes and obsessions.  The line endings are quite brilliant.  Look at the way

          “Till severed

          Knocking upon the

          Bone chimes

          Hollow” creates a psychological gap or gasp, a vertigo hangs on the use of the world “the”.  There are instances of synaesthesia which show that we can’t trust the subject matter to stay stable, nor the senses,

          “Breathless the eye”.

There is a mention of opiates and the experience is like a bad trip of the soul which can be used as a device to explain the unfamiliar.  There is also the occasional suggestion of a struggle for faith.

          “(Bring out your dead)” seems apocalyptic, an

          “The lightning

         Of the upturned

          Eyes”, could subtly reference religion, though the poems seem Nietzschen.   There isn’t an ‘I’ in these poems, the closest we get to an identifiable persona is that some things are

          “(Asked of)”.  That in itself is a very radical challenge, there is only witnessing.  The hinted at persona is

          “Next to none

          And nothing next”.

The poems haunt with lines such as,

          “Or a locket of

          Shadow”, not quite sentimental, or entirely romantic in these contexts of visceral imagery and the poetry of the bodily real,

          “Doused by final piss”.

There is great skill in the lines,

          “Split skyline of

          Heaving silences”, suggesting chasms that want to be alive and personified but lack the ability to connect their herein with their non herein.  And the weight of the word “black” in,

          “Breathing of the black pulse” is tonally (musically) disturbing as it fights with the “ck” “lse” glooping sounds.

    

The poem’s imagery is bleak, fragmentary and sometimes deadly,

          “Ah bone wither”, but notice how carefully, how artfully the poet controls the havoc by means of fine articulation,

          “Skull

          Droplets of rampage

         The dead eyes wastage of it”, even the chaos has style.

   

Meanings jump to their opposites,

          “Ballast heart” implies the hope of safety, the heart as stable but later…

          “Spew of the heart’s cancer”.  There is a line where the gaps between words stretch into two spaces, a void for something to slip into that never comes, a visual representation of it.  We are “Lingering on the dice of loss”, chance has brought us here not self-making, which must therefore hold an absence of guilt.

          “Echo

          (None)

          Echo

          (None)” is a ghostly chorus of lack, deceptively simple but profound.

         “Breath (Till Knock) -

          Breath

         The knock of absence” has dramatic urgency; with terror embedded but the knock is also a chasm, a vertigo.   And like many quests, in the end there is nothing to find, nothing to know, “Knowing of the which or when of naught” leaves mere disappointment.

    

The line “Head of sand” is brilliantly Surrealist but as important as it is as an image, just as striking is its economy.  But all things fall into each other,

          “Smear of night

          Till flesh smeared” is closer to Impressionism in its blurriness.

And the norms of narrative are skewed to be only potential narratives,

          “Further back in till forage laughter” is merely a hint.

Some echoes are very subtle,

          “Bone orchid” becomes

          “Orchid

           (Orchid)” so we can’t read the “Orchid” without thinking of bones.  And the line

          “All along the walls the fathom refusing to scream of it” shouldn’t work.  There is no natural caesura; the line has a magnet in it pulling us past the scream.  Throughout these poems there is a need to grasp language in its meanings which forever change and are elusive.  And whether language is decorative or destitute, making language unexpected is at the core of Michael Mc Aloran’s talent.

It can be purchased here

 

'In Damage Seasons', a review by Christine Murray

Not Bell-Jar, but Cylinder: In Damage Seasons.

 

Not Bell-Jar, but Cylinder: In Damage Seasons.

A reading of In Damage Seasons, by Michael McAloran, published Oneiros Books 2013.

---

‘Clear the air! Clean the sky! Wash the wind! Take

the stone from the stone,

take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from

the bone, and wash them.

Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain,

wash the soul, wash them wash them!’ 

                       The Chorus, from Murder In The Cathedral by T.S Eliot

(we convulse in sun light there are skins to trace and there is flesh to caress in some sudden dawning where the sudden shakes the boundary's clasp....)                    

                                       Scene Forty Two, In Damage Seasons

The structure underpinning Michael McAloran's In Damage Seasons is palladian (a.b.a) or a quasi-triptych. It isn't however an altar-piece or a pleasure-dome of a book. The three sections of In Damage Seasons are: Onset, In Damage Seasons, and nothing's bones-. These individual sections do work as stand alone pieces without compromising the unity of the book's thematic structure. Indeed, I have re-read nothing's bones- a number of times.

The thematic thrust of the book which fully comprises 130 pages interspersed with kaleidoscope images, is barely contained in the second section eponymously titled and consisting of fifty individual scenes. Onset opens the book setting the myriad kaleidoscope theme, and nothing’s bones-  the third part of the work, is a paean. It forms an accumulation and gathering of the essence of the book. It is a beautifully written after-death, where life itself is the exilic-condition.

Onset and nothing's bones- could represent ostensible hinged sections of the overall triptych (or palladian super-structure) that is In Damage Seasons. They are as splattered with blood, torn nails, ejaculate and shit as the Hieronymous Bosch nightmare mid-section of the book.

Make no mistake, Onset and nothing's bones- barely enclose the mid-section of the book and do not make for a sense of containment let alone comfort. Their purpose is to articulate the wolf howl of loss and an uncompromising poetic-voice that sometimes feels oxygenless. nothing's bones- consists of a disembodied voice that has deranged from its centre and meaning.

In visual-terms the book is the raw howl of a lost generation. McAloran is too consummately skilled  in image-making to drop his theme (the howl) and he works it with a fine acuity. 

#9-

‘sing spun alone till dry of speech the asking of the

prayers from the hollow entity unto some foreign grace

traceless depth will in end no end in depth sing spun

alone till speech evaporated’

                                                               from nothing’s bones-

The dystopian landscape and setting of In Damage Seasons is dense with image and requires the reader's full concentration. Here the wusses may leave, it is not for you. 

‘an amber nocturne and the force of blue stun a

silhouette a shadowing a trail of dead words scattered

behind in retrospect of hollow oblivion’s benign claim I

or we/eye dead of yet but once heart meat heart less...’ 

                                      Scene Twenty Five (is dead meat heart...)

The walls of a cylinder form occur throughout In Damage Seasons. This cylinder has polished metal sides, and an interesting kaleidoscopic window detail. Sylvia Plath often described the rarefied air of her bell-jar, and her reader knows that its breach involved the fatal-wounding of her panic-bird. She described her artifice, her work, as the blood-jet of poetry. 

In McAloran's case its blood-jet, ejaculate, tearing, bruising, incision and excreta. It is loss, torture, violence and pain.

‘the blood comes to the fore and there is nothing....’

Colours inherent in the book are amber and blue, a streak of red, and shades of metallic. One minute the writer is imprisoned in the doom of the non-working affair, the next he is shattering the funnel against a stone-wall and walking through the shardings of glass barely observing the beauty he made. It is meant to wound his feet, his hands and his body. We read rupture, derangement of form, and the screaming voice.

‘kicking convulsive in the reek asking of the breaking

night’s dissemble through the cortex mirror a sheen of

black iris flowerings a kaleidoscope of burning

carousels spun alone reaching for none...

the blade asks of the final wind the death inhaled the

caress of some vital wound ask of till subtle bound

some stasis somewhere other than sung aloud in glint

of darkness...’ 

                                    Scene Forty Two (is stillness to brace...)

There is no piety to the howling of this poet. There is a type of tenderness and wry acceptance which could not be called compromise in any way, shape or fashion. This is strong and assured work. It is unrelenting for the reader. 

'...here and there the blind terse the fettering of all spun

till head of till spire of spine recorded as if to un-know

hence laughter cracks the ice like some obscene 

symphonium trace of desire still the living clot in the

eye the tongue torn out silenced of all ...

...ah break the bones of it there'll yet be asked of till

splendour held in mockery of stun shards of bone and

foreign silences child's toys fragments the walls peeling

in the artificial light...  

                                                                             from Onset , 5- 

The sense, or aftertaste of a book gives it its meaning. I tend to leave down a McAloran book with a sense of altered-reality. To me that is the meat of the poetic work, and it is often absent from the canon due to a mistaken sense that poetry should lack violence, or maybe it should do something pretty. Like possibly adorn the margins of a chocolate-box culture bent into its own restless consumption.

If your taste runs to Bataillesque, then this is the meat for you. In Damage Seasons is post-apocalyptic with a hint of tender. The apocalypse inherent in the book’s imagery is of body and of mind. It contains the reality of violence worked on the body and told through the disembodied mouth in the brilliantly written nothing’s bones-

            'the stone breath of it till speech resigned asking of no

            longer no more

           ah there'll yet be afar no nothing of the afar the hands

          foreign  the rat pulse of the scum of all here or there

          hereafter drawn out till claim renounced echoing out

          from scream till silence breathless 

         

          ashen the sealed eye of nowhere dragging its blood

          throughout the memory of never having been ' 

                                                                                                                                       from  nothing's bones- #10