Author Description

Product Description Haunted by a sense of loss and foreboding, this fourth collection is rich in poems that raise the quiet mutiny against a withering cosmos. A dark magic works here, sustained by poetry that is often complex, ironic, disquieting, impassioned, and sometimes even wildly comic. In these pages we are confronted with the poet in midair, the Walrus Voluptuary, a tree that becomes a woman, a man with the head of a black swan. The poet's resonant voice convokes a cycle of spellbinding images, both concrete and elusive, that are, indeed, flares burning in the counterfeit night. From Kirkus Reviews Short-story writer, poet, dramatist, and essayist, Basso has contributed work to Chicago Review, Collages & Bricolages, Exquisite Corpse, and other magazines. Readers familiar with these publications will have an immediate sense of Bassos poetic flavor. There is much more to his idiom, however, than mere technical condiments masking an insipid text. These poems are truly substantial and, too rarely the case with modern verse, their essence is more than their expression. The rhythms of Bassos poetry are absolutely natural, not constrained by intellectual fashion or sustained by gimmickry. The ear of this critically acclaimed dramatist is evident in verses where spoken, not merely printed, language is inherent in the cadences and textures. The poems are simple in phrasing, yet nearly mythic in proportion. Theyre at once magical, ceremonial, and musical, so that reading them aloud becomes the reciting of incantations. As is implied in the title of this, the authors fourth, collection, Catafalques deals with loss and leaving, with the transitory nature of human existence. But the poets is not an empty universe, nor his voice an existential caterwauling. The images, while often foreboding, are also haunting and touching, at times even humorous. Every evening at dusk, the song of a once-beautiful woman enchants an entire village,