DROPPING ECSTASY

“………..My breast offering comfort //  In the ritual abuse of motherhood……”(The Morning After) 

Dee Rimbaud is a poet who gets straight to the point. And in the process, what he creates is not our usual definition of poetry, perhaps, but it remains something equally good; for what he does without in rhythm, he certainly makes up for with his word play. Savour this:

 “We are unwise after the event, each one of us shaken: //The terrible beauty that is life…” (An Epitaph)

 or

 “Out of fusion, you said, comes confusion; // And from mud, the essence of so much colour.” (First Cut)

 “Dropping Ecstasy with the Angels” is Rimbaud’s second collection of poetry. Taking off from where his “The Bad Seed” left off, the poet walks a more tempered path in the present selection, looking at the world with a wiser eye. While the dusky pall still dwells over his verses, the poet exhibits a more tolerant approach to life in general, and people in particular. While in “The Bad Seed” he was writing

 “Monosynthesis, this raw jazz in sherbet fizzed arteries // Of motorway madness and inarticulated, sublimated rage, // This flesh pulped in God's hands, the saviour surgeon // Who makes and unmakes us in his own image”  (Motorway Ghost)

 in “Ecstasy” he writes

 “Rave on! // Dance to the rhythm //   Of your heart. //  Allow the snake // That swallowed your elephant //  To masquerade as a hat”     (Stealing Heaven from the Lips of God, or How to succeed at Living)

 Yes, one cannot help notice the poet’s allusion to St Exupery’s “The Little Prince”; in so doing he moulds softness with passion, creating images that were absent in his earlier works. And that forms the essence of his words; the beautiful, sometimes harsh imagery of verses interwoven to create a persisting aura of nostalgia. Rimbaud waddles through fragile notes of swansung requiems, thus taking the reader up and down through the myriad world of human psyche, stopping now and then to gather little nuggets of hope and hopelessness, of desire and despair. One certainly cannot blame the poet for the charred wisps of desolation that float in through the poems; alas, such are the times that we live in. The reader cannot but give full marks to the poet for weaving the fantasy aura around the chaotic scramble of wayward sensibility - "Desolation, yes"; the reader sighs, " but what a beautiful sunset".

However, the feelings that make some of his poems exquisite are the very feelings that, at times, ruin the reader’s attention. On more than one occassion the poet goes overboard with his fury of helplessness, and beats his fists on juvenile walls, with words such as “The angels in his head // Dance through viscous rusted cloud, // Thick as the moon’s blood: // Soft as a whisper.” (Asylum Angels), or “A glass of milked blood //Resinous // Cool as springtime dawn”.  Such obvious allusions to  “Moon’s blood” or “soft whisper”or “milked blood”, though conveying a rather rusted sense of loss, do nothing to improve the poem’s spirit. And what is this obsession with blood anyway? Clichéd words and phrases such as these kill the reader’s attention – they are, after all, readily available in any of the poetry chat rooms. The poet would do well to avoid such shoddy, half hearted verses in future.

 Again, Rimbaud even at his descriptive best fails to be light hearted – surely there must be some joy, some hope lingering somewhere that does not just parade as a word but glitters in its own glory? Seemingly he has chosen to ignore one of the basic tenets of being a poet: that of “Being Alive”.

 However, when one compares his earlier works with the present one, , Rimbaud certainly comes across as a definite talent –one steadily moving on towards exhibiting his true potential. And going by the sea change in the content and style between his two poetry collections, we can still expect a lot more out of him. After all, this is the poet who beats the rhythm drum with:

 “You are the magus and we are the fools:

You tall poppy, you,

Who grew and grew and grew

Despite the clouds

That smothered the sun…….”

 The best, it seems, is yet to come.