LightYears In The Dark StoryPoems edition by Todd Crawshaw Literature Fiction eBooks
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The epigraph from Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse sets the tone for Todd Crawshaw’s strange, daring, and beautiful collection of StoryPoems, Light-Years in the Dark. Meant for those who seek inspiration and the meaning of life, the book takes readers on a vital metaphysical and spiritual journey through both darkness and light. A StoryPoem, defined by the author, is a hybrid genre of poetry and short story inspired by Cranes' The Black Riders & Other Lines and Debussy's Preludes for Piano, where each concise piece is a cosmos, a distilled symphony. In Light-Years in the Dark, Crawshaw has invented a magical world that is elaborately imaginative, often haunting, and bursting with stunning imagery. An alternate universe alternating between lightness and darkness, a yin-yang composition of interacting forces, this collection is analogous to a rich assortment of light and dark chocolates contained in a box each is meant to be savored slowly, carefully ingested, in a quiet space that allows for contemplation and reflection.
Some short, others long, these are tales about a variety of characters, ideas, and emotions a two-headed man, a woman of incomplete mind, a man whose life is a blur, a performing artist haunted by spirits, a waste collector who discovers a baby, an inner-city history teacher, a terrorist, and survivors. They are also about love at first sight, reflections, prophesy, amour, immortality, magic, omniscience, seduction, fear, warmth, life, death and epiphany.
For more information visit www.crowsnestpublishing.com or www.toddcrawshaw.com.
LightYears In The Dark StoryPoems edition by Todd Crawshaw Literature Fiction eBooks
I'd call it Light Years In The Mind.Every Story Poem touches on primal
prehistoric human animal experiences,
and takes you right there.
Familiar, mysterious places abound.
Great concept and execution makes it fun to read,
straight through or a little bit at a time.
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LightYears In The Dark StoryPoems edition by Todd Crawshaw Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
'Light Years in the Dark' was very interesting in such a way as to be thought provoking. Give it a read.
Loved this book! The story poems Crawshaw conjures up in this book are more than short stories. They are almost mini-movies; tightly woven word dramas that create images so visual yet so intimate that you feel, in only a paragraph or a page that you've read a complete novel; and one you won't soon forget. Then you turn the page and another one begins.
I couldn't put this little book down. Each short piece seemed like a window, or a portal that, when opened, drew me into one more magical world of emotion, wonder, action, pathos or even mysticism, all so beautifully wrought, and exquisitely crafted, that I just had to turn the page to see where the next one would take me.
I'll say without hesitation that this is a terrific book and one that you'll be giving to your friends. I've given away four copies already. Loved it.
These are Story Poems -- "ficciones", Borges -- "fables", Merwin... also Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Homer, nearly all "poetry", and all "songs"...
One trouble with novels being that they have beginnings and endings, and story lines -- one trouble with poems being that very often they don't.
A novel can hang you, wrap you in its web, sweep you inexorably to an ending -- and by the time you are there you forget what you have read.
A poem on the other hand can leave you hanging -- begin in the middle, end there too, or after or even before, and sometimes a poem doesn't end at all but simply stops. Think of the Iliad a few days, only, in a ten-year war -- no Iphigenia, not even The Trojan Horse.
So Crawshaw here experiments, with approaches and forms very different from those he uses in his excellent and sweeping novel, _Exploits of the Satyr_. Here his Story Poems similarly offer his favorite motifs -- darkness, and light, and ambiguities -- but in a far different form. His book begins with a quotation from Virginia Woolf, who defines his medium well Crawshaw here is working in not novels or epics or elegies but, more telling at times and far more memorable, "little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark".
In both books Crawshaw masterfully presents his central concern, uncertainty, of both his characters and his readers, and one senses of himself, as one of the leading characteristics of our age.
In the novel the issues are personal, and they happen to someone else. We feel empathy with, sympathy for, the novel's central figure Slater, who endures what most of us endure, and more -- but we are not him.
In Crawshaw's Story Poems, though, things are brought in, they hit even closer to home we are present, we are actors -- he takes up some of the personal questions asked by Slater, in the novel, and here instead makes them general and even more ambiguous. Whether written before or after, these Story Poem pieces extend and even overwhelm the more precise and structured form which the novel had to take.
So, a Story Poems sampler the following are a few favorite lines -- some of these are from very short pieces in the book, only a few lines long, while others are from Story Poems which go on for several pages -- some of the Story Poems are gentle, a few make for pretty rough reading, but then good poetry is never as gentle as it first appears to be --
"In a remote mountain village lived a man who wore a mask" -- short prose still can be poetry, it's about the rhythm...
"He told them stories, age-old remedies designed to repair the damage over time" -- self-definition, from a Story Poem he calls "Dementia" -- there is a playfulness throughout much of Crawshaw's prose...
"There was a woman who danced herself to death and no one knew why" -- playfulness again, but also a poignancy, this initial-line intrigues as it introduces...
"I could hold in my hands the petals of regret or let chance flower on the stem" -- complete concepts, complete poems, appear frequently here...
"Angels are with us, said a woman seated beside me on a plane. I smiled politely and went back to my reading." -- be sure to read this one, you'll remember her, and him, as will any of us who ever has spent a lifetime on airplanes, or ever has encountered a stranger...
"He accumulated toasters, lamps, blenders, and brought them back to life. The radios, record players, and televisions were more difficult to revive, but he managed to save a few of them" -- this particular guy is not me, but I've met a few of him -- I _love_ that he "brings toasters back to life", and that he "revives" and "saves" old record players...
"She sat in a glass booth selling tickets to those who wished to view her life" -- one of the most powerful and disturbing images, here, at once both damning and redeeming of both viewer and viewed, as Crawshaw himself says in the Story Poem of which this line is a part -- that "glass" booth, and those who "wished" -- the power deriving from what it says about modern womanhood, maybe, but also personhood generally, which per Andy Warhol and Lady Gaga and too many others has become a very disturbing place, recently -- the ambiguities in all that, which all is still so new...
"She reached into the sky and brought down a shower of wetness with her fingertips. She fell in love with droplets as they shimmered" -- a beautiful image, beautifully-expressed...
"She was searching for the essence of her self. In the books she read. In the people she met. The men she loved. The work she created. She wanted the stories to be real. Each mind to be interesting. The effort to be worthwhile. The trust to be reciprocal" -- again a powerful and disturbing image, for the Andy Warhol and Lady Gaga reasons suggested above and even more generally -- _The Quest for Certainty_, John Dewey called it...
"Locked in his private hell at the end of the hall, in an ordinary room, was a man held hostage by himself" -- simple statements are best -- Crawshaw's direct language offers straight delivery of several -- this one is followed by, among other things, "a night-light served for children, a lie that reassured -- like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny -- providing false hope" -- this is, as I warned here initially, not always gentle stuff...
"He fought to climb the ice walls into darkness and touch the stars. He fell back, hands burned, eyes blinded, and cried -- Why? The crowd rejoiced at his success. No, a failure, he insisted, but was denied." -- that is an entire Story Poem, a short one but nevertheless a powerful and rich and endlessly complicated one -- it gives some indication of the treasures to be found in both the long and the shorter pieces, here...
"The sky was in his eyes, this unwavering unfathomable blue. She let her fingers be kissed, transforming her into something strange and beautiful" -- a gentle and delicate expression of human relationship, buried in a piece longer and darker which describes a lifetime...
A Story Poem is not so much a poem as a story, then, in Crawshaw's formulation an incident, a vignette, a glimpse -- the way we experience life walking down a street, or anticipating it, or remembering it years afterward. Leave it to novels to organize the experience, to show us the continuities a Story Poem, instead, gives us a glimpse of the bright bird in the forest, the ghost coyote fleeing, the chance encounter on the subway -- all indelibly imprinted, so we remember them the rest of our lives.
I'd call it Light Years In The Mind.
Every Story Poem touches on primal
prehistoric human animal experiences,
and takes you right there.
Familiar, mysterious places abound.
Great concept and execution makes it fun to read,
straight through or a little bit at a time.
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