davidkm | Entries tagged with sneyd

Sneyd, Steve, 2008, Mistaking the Nature of the Posthuman, perfect-bound trade pb, Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, HD5 8PB, England, ISBN 978-0-905262-42-0, 107 p, ￡6.99/$14.

Historian of SF poetry, chronicler of global SF poetry news, prolific English SF poet whose work is well-known everywhere among genre poetry readers. That is Steve Sneyd, and any new collection from him is eagerly anticipated. Here it is, with an intriguing and disturbing cover by Gunter Wessalowski. If I counted right, there are 96 poems in this book. According to the introduction, these poems were all first published in the 21st century, not many years on, yet the book reads like a best-of high-graded compilation. There is not a dud in the lot.

The introduction, written by the author, appears to claim that the book is published as a guide to surviving the future. Works for me. Although if you use this book as a guide to survival it might just convince you to give up right now. But don't do that! At least read the book first.

The first poem is "If the doors of perception were cleansed." Here's an excerpt.

... just like today only nicer and
futuristic how it ought to be the
best of home only better smoother
cosier somehow if we didn't have
to get back jobs to go to and
Elaine's mum and the kids and anyway

Well, you get the idea. Sneyd doesn't believe in punctuation and has heard rumors of pronouns and prepositions, but does not believe they have been sighted in the wild. Somehow it's all quite understandable (albeit occasionally with a little work).

From "We are also keys to the experiment"

snakes bred russet-red for survival camouflage
in case just in case with monster multifiltered
lungs to breathe
in hindsight the russet we suspect aesthetic
and fangs megafangs manipulated into drills
to search subsurface water out that too late we learn
In this low gravity will also grow

In Sneyd's future nothing ever works like we expect or plan. And when does it ever? Maybe these cautionary tales are spot on accurate. Let me just give you a further taste of the content of this remarkable book. Open it to any page.

From "As is written in the emergency manual,"

Airless Extraterrestrial Enterprises tests our faith
will at very last possible instant as we hallucinate
flake into non-sentience save us reward such loyalty

From "Included out,"

sure beyond doubt more than half at least
the others at these dos are same as me are
not the humans they appear to be at all and
all the towers of the world I am so sure
full night on night of humans hiding from
each other...

What if, all unknowing, you take one of these androids home? Androids who can't be sure of each others' humanity. At least, with clothes on.

From "The sanctity of his mission,"

and
before
sending the virgin to her doom
who otherwise would have anyhow within
a cycle gone into ground

a crop-source-placator she
at least now will not have to
burrow down alone: a hybrid in
her belly, a tasty

extra bonus for the god or gods.

One gets the impression that what is being said is so very important the words tumble over one another in a hopeless attempt to get out before it's too late. I guess if this is a handbook of the "break glass in emergency" kind that might be true. After all, aren't we waist deep in the future already? If this book is instead a metaphor about how hopelessly stranger and more desolate we ourselves will become than most of us can imagine, nevermind what our tools or aliens will be like, then there's no hurry. Cherish your illusions. Don't read this book. Trust me, you don't want to knw what can happen to us, out there, or even right here at home. What you do want to know is, if you buy only one SF poetry book this month, or this season, Mistaking the Nature of the Posthuman should be it.

I know I'm giving what some will misconstrue as contradictory advice, but I maintain that's the best way to deal with the future. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit I was the first publisher of one or two poems in this collection.

Sneyd, Steve, 2005, Ahasuerus on Mars, Atlantean publishing, 38 Pierrot Steps, 71 Kursaal Way, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, SS1 2UY, United Kingdom, checks to DJ Tyrer, £1, saddlestitched with cover of lightweight cover stock. Not paginated. Illustrated by Alan Hunter.

This book contains one 8-page poem. Ahasuerus is of course the wandering Jew, and in this poem he wanders pretty dang far. To his sorrow he discovers that no matter how far you go it is pretty difficult to escape your own thoughts and memories. Steve departs a little in this poem from his usual highly compressed style, although you can't read a stanza without knowing who wrote it.

The poem begins with Ahasuerus telling in the first person how he relates to his short-lived crewmates, then that he did not expect the curse would allow him to leave Earth. He speculates about the reasons, and also tells facts about his life, as if to a curious questioner. We learn that he can father children, cannot be killed (although he can suffer pain from physical injury or illness), has little in common with vampires, and so on. He goes on at great length about his millennia of suffering. This is followed by a long section in which the Wandering Jew reminds the reader of why he received his curse in the first place. Finally, the trip down memory lane ends, and the story comes back to its present on Mars.

As a story the poem is not entirely successful. I did learn or remember a number of things about the biblical story. We can all picture what life must be like for the reluctant immortal, though Steve fleshes it out more than we might have in our imagination. Mars seems like a contrived vehicle for telling the protagonist's story. He could be anywhere, and that is the problem I have with the plot. It is not a true science-fiction story because the science-fiction elements are grafted on like Frankenstein's monster's head.

As a poem this comes closer to the mark. Here are a couple of examples.

First he whines...

though in fact I have tried madness
too and that is also too self-heal
to help at all or any drug
or anything to change to shut
the tick of brainpan down

then he tries to justify himself...

did him a favour really made sure
he didn't let himself down
weakness shown before his following his fans
the silent majority of the town

artfully damning himself more with every phrase. This is where Steve almost always excels and he certainly does it here. The reading is both a challenge and a delight.

The layout in this book leaves something to be desired. The right hand pages, those that would have odd numbers if they had numbers, have no left margin at all. The words almost run right out of sight. When it was realized it was going to look like this, the publisher really should have reformatted the manuscript. However, everything is actually visible and can be read.

To summarize, the book could look better and to the plot could be more believable, but the writing is superb.

Sneyd, Steve, ed., 2005, Medusa, a poetry anthology, Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire HD5 8PB England, ISBN 0 905262 37 9, £3.99/$9, checks payable to S. Sneyd. Saddle stitched 58 pages + card stock cover.

Steve Sneyd is well-known for his scholarship concerning genre poetry and for his distinctive writing style. This is by no means the first book he has edited, but you rarely see an anthology of poetry with such a specific theme. Perhaps only Steve could get away with that. "Medusa" is remarkably diverse, attesting both to the fascination that the Medusa legend holds for writers and to the ambiguity of the legend itself, which gives free rein for experimentation in quite a few directions.

The book is divided into 6 sections. The first, UK Poets, accounts for a little more than half of the book. The remainder consists of Overseas Poets, Notes, Contributor Data, Medusa in Poetry, and The Medusa Legend. The notes were quite fascinating and I found the brief summary of the legend comprehensive. Every part of this book belongs. Nine of the poems in this book were previously published, but that leaves 33 new in this publication. I particularly like the graphic image of Medusa on the cover, which is by Andy Cocker. Nearly 2 dozen small, stark images are scattered strategically through the book. Disclaimer: one of the poems in this book is by me.

What if Medusa did not understand her power? In "Medusa" by a. f. harrold, we encounter this

_Sometimes I hear movement -- the shifting aside of grass or
the pricking of thorn -- but when I investigate I find there
nothing but stonework and then chill night envelops me._

This book explores many viewpoints and possibilities. From "Medusa's Legacy," by John Light

_"It smiled at me,
the statue smiled."_

From “Auto da fe” by Susie Reynolds:

_At the trial Medusa was examined
Lost in coils they analyse
"Snakes = Lost Eden"
Her golden body, tossed_

Oh my God, buy this book! If you're like me you will not care for every poem in this anthology, but the aggregate is like a composite photograph. Stand close to the picture and you see a myriad of individual small photographs, which may be quite unlike one another. Step back far enough and you see the Medusa, emerging as the product of a subtle reaction among her multifarious parts.

Bailey, K. V., 2008, The Sky Giants, cover and interior drawings by Ian Brown, Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, HD5 8PB UK, saddle-stitched, stiff plastic-coated cover, not paginated, but 48 pages, $7. ISBN 978-0-905262-40-6.

A sturdy offering, reprint of an out-of-print 1989 chapbook by the late K. V. Bailey. According to Steve Sneyd, the publisher of this edition, Bailey was a much-underrated British science fiction and fantasy poet. All of his chapbooks are now out of print, although some of his work is available in other publications that remain in print. Accordingly, it seemed opportune to Sneyd, whose interest in the history of genre poetry is well known, to make it easy for a younger generation to become acquainted with one of Britain's best fantastic poets.

"The Sky Giants" includes, in addition to the preface written by the author, a foreword by Steve Sneyd about Bailey. Bailey's 10 poetry collections were published over a period of 16 years, from 1982 to 1998. However, all but one saw print during the 1980s, which makes him rather prolific. Especially when you consider that poetry collections were by no means his only literary output

In this, his penultimate chapbook, Bailey retold the story of Parsifal, a Knight of the Grail. This has been done before, but Bailey transposes his knight to a far future world of spaceships, multiple inhabited planets, and anachronistic castles and other trappings of Parsifal's medieval origin.

The main part of the book consists of a single poem in 16 parts. I confess to having only a passing knowledge of Parsifal's story. Nevertheless, I found the poem enjoyable and I don't think a detailed knowledge of Arthurian legends is at all necessary to appreciate this chapbook. There are multiple versions of the story, but in a nutshell, one version goes as follows. Parsifal, after a childhood passed isolated from society, observes the heroism of knights and decides that's the career he wants. He is invited to join the Knights of the Round Table (after proving his worth), and ends up being one of Galahad's two companions in the successful quest for the Grail. In what is perhaps the oldest known version of the story, it is Parsifal himself who finds the Grail.

Bailey's version of the story begins with Parsifal's thoughts about Arthur's kingdom, for which he plans to search.

"And how is Logres seen?
The spectral summoner has been
for ship and drifting raft
a gleam: it glows; is lightning-shaft;"

In successive chapters Parsifal visits a city of spinning towers, a deadly and psychedelic chess game, and is given a task that will, if he completes it, lead him closer to the Grail

"circling, the stallions prance and shy:
before again their ivory hooves go clattering by
turret and mitred tower
upon the elbow-crooked lanes
of worlds restored."

In the pursuit of the Grail, Parsifal visits worlds torn by war, covered with strange and hostile vegetation, and inhabited by fearsome beasts. His quest takes him off world to space habitats and their peculiar inhabitants, until he reaches the Round Table (suitably updated).

Well I'm not going to tell you how it ends. The published versions of the tale have a number of different endings, and that makes a new retelling all the more interesting.

Glorious and uplifting, fraught with peril and wonder, that's what we have here. I am glad that Steve has made some of K. V. Bailey's poetry accessible to us all.