Looking Back, Glancing Forward
Nov. 12th, 2024 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidkmFantasy Life, 2004, Mario Milosevic, Ruby Rose’s Fairy Tale Emporium, Box 1100, Stevenson, WA 98648; mm@gorge.net. Perfect-bound paperback, 104 pages. Available from an online print-on-demand service, www.lulu.com/mariomilosevic. No price listed on book. ISBN 1-4116-0978-6.
Aside from the striking black-and-white cover, done in a very graphic style, the first thing I noticed about the book is that it was self published. This is not necessarily a negative thing. I have read a lot of self published poetry books and chapbooks, and some of them were superb.
This book contains 17 reprints and 62 new poems; that is a much higher proportion of new poems than is typical for poetry books. I suppose this means that Mario is very prolific. It would take me three years to write that many poems. Even more gratifying: most of these are very nice poems. One of the previously published poems first appeared in Dreams and Nightmares, the magazine I publish. Five of the others appeared first in Asimov's. So Mario is not only prolific, his best is very good, at least if the judgment of editors is anything to go by. But we don't have to rely on that, because there are 79 poems here and we can read them for ourselves. This is enough material to get a really good idea of the breadth and depth of the poet's body of work. Except of course, that this book has a theme, indicated by the title, and so we are only seeing one part of what he is capable of. But let's take a look at the part.
From "where did all the porches go"
contractors are
not noted for defying
the magical folk.
Part house part yard,
porches were the twilight
portions of human houses.
They existed between worlds.
This fragment shows you something about Mario's poetry. Structurally it is simple. Most poems in this book have short lines of roughly equal length. They consist of sentences, and the art lies in how to word them and where to break them up. They don't have broken lines, in which one sentence or phrase ends and the next begins in a single line. This is not true of all of his poems. In "the cloak of death" for instance, he uses the technique I just mentioned.
I never caught up with death. He breezed
out of my life. Did he have the hots
for some raven-haired beauty unknown
to us mortals? Or was it lots
This poem has rhyme and meter, which is not particularly common in Mario's poetry. Most poems in this book are free verse. When they do rhyme, though, the result is pleasing. I see that I have chosen three poems with a wistful tone. There are many such in this book, but they don't dominate. Here is a portion of "faded hues," one of a number of forward-looking or even defiant poems in "Fantasy Life".
I greet the image
of my greener self,
all wet and newly formed,
with welcoming words
to quell the terror living
in his heart
The bottom line is that this book is a bargain. And I think we will be hearing even better things from Mario Milosevic in years to come. If you buy a copy of "Fantasy Life," someday you might be able to lean back, stroke your chin, and say "yep, and I have one of his first books; probably worth a lot today..."
Aside from the striking black-and-white cover, done in a very graphic style, the first thing I noticed about the book is that it was self published. This is not necessarily a negative thing. I have read a lot of self published poetry books and chapbooks, and some of them were superb.
This book contains 17 reprints and 62 new poems; that is a much higher proportion of new poems than is typical for poetry books. I suppose this means that Mario is very prolific. It would take me three years to write that many poems. Even more gratifying: most of these are very nice poems. One of the previously published poems first appeared in Dreams and Nightmares, the magazine I publish. Five of the others appeared first in Asimov's. So Mario is not only prolific, his best is very good, at least if the judgment of editors is anything to go by. But we don't have to rely on that, because there are 79 poems here and we can read them for ourselves. This is enough material to get a really good idea of the breadth and depth of the poet's body of work. Except of course, that this book has a theme, indicated by the title, and so we are only seeing one part of what he is capable of. But let's take a look at the part.
From "where did all the porches go"
contractors are
not noted for defying
the magical folk.
Part house part yard,
porches were the twilight
portions of human houses.
They existed between worlds.
This fragment shows you something about Mario's poetry. Structurally it is simple. Most poems in this book have short lines of roughly equal length. They consist of sentences, and the art lies in how to word them and where to break them up. They don't have broken lines, in which one sentence or phrase ends and the next begins in a single line. This is not true of all of his poems. In "the cloak of death" for instance, he uses the technique I just mentioned.
I never caught up with death. He breezed
out of my life. Did he have the hots
for some raven-haired beauty unknown
to us mortals? Or was it lots
This poem has rhyme and meter, which is not particularly common in Mario's poetry. Most poems in this book are free verse. When they do rhyme, though, the result is pleasing. I see that I have chosen three poems with a wistful tone. There are many such in this book, but they don't dominate. Here is a portion of "faded hues," one of a number of forward-looking or even defiant poems in "Fantasy Life".
I greet the image
of my greener self,
all wet and newly formed,
with welcoming words
to quell the terror living
in his heart
The bottom line is that this book is a bargain. And I think we will be hearing even better things from Mario Milosevic in years to come. If you buy a copy of "Fantasy Life," someday you might be able to lean back, stroke your chin, and say "yep, and I have one of his first books; probably worth a lot today..."
