r by Peycho Kanev (Book Review)

r by Peycho Kanev

As I begin to read r – an unusual choice of title for a book, I see in the begining lines of the poem, small revenge, how the poet is verging between the dividing line of sanity and incoherence. It is somehow reminiscent of Baudelaire, beautiful yet potentially destructive.

“I don’t care about the metrics, the iambus
and the rhymes-I have read the classics and then
I put them back on their dusty shelves:
we write about something that comes from the guts
and the nails as the flowers outside
explode…”

The above stanza appears to be setting a tone, perhaps an underlying theme whose recurrence will be observed throughout the book.

“the poetry, can I say that I don’t care?
I prefer to drink alone in this room in front of
one candle
as the shadows in the corners sit and show us
their ugly faces,
ah, I know that the words are greater that we thought
and we will fall in their holes,”

A subtle sense of nihilism hints at the mockery of conventional literary pursuits; poets and writers, who abandon society for the company of their solitude, because they have gone both ways, the past which did not serve them any good, and a future that seems oblique.

The following stanza in “something in flowerpot” stands out to me, for its brevity and personification:

the night knows how much to fill my glass
and after that to stand up and
to pour water from the kettle
on the thing in the flowerpot

the night is dying of thirst like
wheat in August

r is about 99 pages in length, artistically composed, the poems hiccup at times, heave with tension, or simply concoct a complicated montage of ideas and images. Intellectually invigorating, it leads the reader through various moods and attempts to dissect the emotion with relation to its experiences.

Peycho Kanev’s book can be purchased on Amazon.