Book Reviews  by Ralph Haselmann Jr.
Lucid Moon Poetry Website (Apr/May/Jun 2000)

The Armegeddon Rag, novel by George R.R. Martin, 1983, $3.95, Pocket Books. This is a well-written, surprising and edgy thriller, often hallucinatory, funny and perceptive. The novel centers around a male rock and roll magazine writer named Sandy Blair who gets caught up in investigating the grisly death of a greedy rock promoter named Jamie Lynch. Jamie had his heart cut out and was found lying atop a rock poster by the group he had managed, the Nazgul, named after a character in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The lead singer of the Nazgul was shot to death during a concert on September 20, 1971. The group played passionate rock rife with politics and sex and death. The author wants you to think of The Doors, but The Nazgul and their comeback concert comes off more like Spinal Tap and Kiss, cartoony and silly lyrics about blood and the darkness. That's what made me dread reading all 400 pages of this pulp novel, more in-concert descriptions of the band shouting out catch phrases to the audience and the audience responding back a thousandfold in unison. "We're gonna make your ears bleed!" vows new fill-in lead singer Larry Richmond as he starts each concert on the reunion tour, and he soon becomes possessed by the spirit of the dead original singer, Patrick Hobbins.
        The novel has a supernatural thing going with the way the new lead singer assumes the spirit of the dead one, and with the band's new manager Edan Morse, who has a habit of cutting his palms with a knife and who becomes progressively weaker and more gaunt, as if all the blood is draining out of him. This book is freaky! The most imaginative passages come from the many nightmares Sandy has while pursuing the case. He books himself into the Chicago Hilton and has nightmares that the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 are taking place all around him, gunfire and fighting between hippie war protesters and the police, teargas and tanks rolling in. Later in the book Sandy has another dream where all his friends appear and talk to him about the situation with the band and his life, how his life is in crisis, and they walk and talk with him through the fog of the city streets and seem like the walking dead. Imaginative stuff.
         The characters and situations are clearly drawn and refreshing, like Bambi and the others at the commune, or bassist Peter Faxon and his balloon ride with Sandy and the family, and the comic go-for-broke antics of the bear of a lead guitarist, Rick Maggio, who has a penchant for sleeping with underage groupies. The sex scenes between Sandy and Ananda are mild but erotic and satisfying. The ending with Sandy and Ananda on the sound tower during the anniversary West Mesa concert of September 20th seems a little contrived, where Sandy becomes so messed up he believes he is supposed to assassinate the new lead singer all over again. Then the plot takes a surprising twist and has a happy typical Hollywood bullshit ending. The ending ties everything up too neatly, but I guess this is as good as it gets. I liked this novel, but I wanted it to be somehow different, more occult-y! This novel is for the Stephen King fan, those who like a greasy cheeseburger and fries sort of novel. King even chimes in with a glowing rave blurb on the cover.
         This novel evokes the spirit of the 1960's, back when there was so much great music coming out every year, not like today's shitty pop with boy groups like N Sync and The Backstreet Boys and slutty girls like Britney Spears. Where's the beef? The only good groups left are aging groups from the 1970's and 1980's like Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, U2 and REM. The rest of today's music blows. Or you can go back to groups from the magical 1960's like The Doors, whom this author wants to evoke in The Nazgul's music. This book was written in 1983 during a resurgence of popularity in the Door's music. The other great book that came out at the time was Eddie and The Cruisers, which had a Morrison/Rimbaud Season In Hell slant and also drew on the mystery of the reappearance of a singer. That was a much better book, for my money. You can still find it at a bookstore, at least, unlike this one…

Blues For Bird, Volumes (1-6) Poetry/prose chapbooks #1-6, 1999, part of a 12 chapbook poem in trimeters on the saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, (1920-1955). By Martin Gray, $5 each, check made out to Dave Christy, Alpha Beat Press, 31 Waterloo Street, New Hope, PA 18938. Blues For Bird is an ambitious biography in poetry/prose of Charlie Parker's life, informative and a pleasure to read. It's not really poetry, more like prose, and it quotes key biographers and people who had contact with Parker throughout his life. Parts 1-6, here printed by Alpha Beat Press, follow Bird through his early days hooking up with Art Tatum and Dizzy Gillespie, his first marriage, and his addiction to heroin or horse as they called it. Bird needed the heroin to ease the pain of a car accident. Book one ends with this fine description of Charlie's playing: "Bird liked to imitate and mimicked on his sax hum of the wind through leaves honk of an auto horrn swish of a speeding car scream of the tires when braked explosion when they burst dire siren of the cops yelp of a pup, dog-bark as if the pooch had talked, Popeye's deep-toned voice Olive Oyl's high pitch falsetto in complaint…He played all colours too: orange yellow green all forty shades of blue as if he played this for every blue there was. Red may raise the heart and green redeem the world especially in spring but blue expresses soul the hunger each of us has for the her or him who lurks there deep within making of each a whole…You hear within Bird's horn poetic qualities: facility and then virtuosity intensity in swing all round inventiveness spontaneity playfulness, a sense of humour in his play deep bluesiness and more performing at his best a horn so sonorous it melted prison bars broke down all barriers of gender, race and class." Blues For Bird is a major piece of work, and volumes 7-12 are due soon. I hope Martin Gray can get this published as a complete book, maybe with a bluish impressionistic painting of Bird on the cover, that would be fantastic. This collection is well worth checking out. You really get a sense of the person Bird was. He had a sense of humour, for instance playing Lady In Red for a member of the audience who had a red dress, or I Know Where You're Going, for women who got up to go to the bathroom! You feel the pain of his heroin addiction, and you wonder what else he might have accomplished had he not been hooked on heroin (he died at a young 34). Blues For Bird is highly recommended, a history lesson full of life, humour and pathos told in epic poetry/prose form.

Charles Bukowski & Alpha Beat Press 1988-1994 Poems, letters and drawings by Charles Bukowski, 36 pages, 1994, $8 check made out to Dave Christy, Alpha Beat Press, 31 Waterloo Street, New Hope, PA 18938. A fine if somewhat thin collection of curious Charles Bukowski ephemera, in letters, doodles, photos and poems published by Alpha Beat Press over 6 years. Bukowski could be sly and witty and his letters were often more fun to read than his poems: "Hello Dave Christy, glad the poems worked for you. Welcome to the U.S. Stay out of trouble. Women, drugs and excessive use of credit can undo anybody. Add to that, a lousy job. Anyhow, hold, Buk ". The poetry is feisty as ever: "I dreamt that I was in my room having been shot in the belly by somebody snakes crawled the floor while outside a schoolmaster sang an old school song then the curtains went to flame the phone rang everything seemed in a hurry to die I coooperated: I pointed the walls to the sky then I shot out like a fountain of dogshit which made all the bad poets happy and all the sappy poets glad: they each considered themselves fit to fill the vacancy then the dream was over I awakened and I was the Norman Mailer of poetry once again." I dug this nice memento of Bukowski's work with Alpha Beat Press, and Dave Christy of Alpha Beat Press is privileged to have corresponded with him..

Climbing Daddy Mountain, Poetry chapbook By Frank Van Zant, 32 pages, 1999, $8.95 from Pudding House Publications, 60 North Main Street, Johnstown, OH 43031. Frank deftly touches on such subjects as his 1 year old child, sports and everyday life. The poems are humorous and are like short stories in and of themselves. Happy First Birthday, Katie-Little-Amazon reads: "This is no crawl, this thing she does on the floor, it's a private undulation, a near dance, the pre-toddling butt-slide stomp, where she transforms, with her left leg extended, her right foot tucked under her knee, arms out to hold her balance, hips scooting forward with a fidgeter's oomph, she is a baserunner stealing second, diving into the slide, sliding on her thigh pads, but she is a hurdler clearing the hurdle, aerodynamically sound at an inch above the carpet, but she is a wounded combat vet, courageous in a wheelchair, rolling forward in her own determined marathon but after all she is a dancer because when she moves she goes kervoomp kervoomp kervoomp along the corridors of my ballroom heart." Frank's surprising use of metaphors and keen sense of humour make these poems fun to read.

Collison Course and Miles of Highways and Open Roads, poetry chapbooks by Michael L. Newell, 46 pages and 50 pages respectively, 1999, $8 each from Foursep Publications, P.O. Box 12434, Milwaukee, WI 53212. Michael Newell was teaching in Tashkent, Russia at the time of these two collections, and is now teaching in Mexico. These companion volumes detail his everyday life abroad in broad painterly strokes and fine detail, all with a loving sense of wonder. He writes with the grace and dignity of a teacher, recording wistful memories as if part of a diary journal. The poetry is beautiful and effecting. Mending reads: "Crumpled on the rug: scraps of sunlight, ripped socks, soiled shirt, strewn papers, dog-eared books, a hope or two. But wait. Wait. Night will come, join me. We'll stroll beneath a quarter-moon draped in billowing cumulus. We'll scan the sky, find warmth and grace rooted in the steady gaze of stars and planets. Fields will crackle with late November frost. Our breath will blossom, weightless as dreams or moonlight. When a shooting star blazes across half the sky, we will gasp, stand motionless. We will shun speech, content with sounds of breathing, footfalls, dogs barking across darkened fields. Our hearts will careen through the dark… Amman, Jordan, 1992" Newell is one of the best poets I have had the pleasure of publishing in Lucid Moon.

Coyote And Selected Poems, Poetry chapbook by Lamar Thomas, 18 pages, 1999, $3 from Blue Feather Press, P.O. Box 1377, Berthoud, CO 80513. Lamar Thomas is an excellent chef and he infuses his poetry with spice and scents and the same joy de vrie of his cooking. Between The Sea and The Sweat reads: " In another summer with another sweating night, my Georgia steams and I steam along also from too much coffee and too many Camels, and my life tries to rise, tries to hover above the wilting mimosa. And I daydream away into August fogs on Manchester Beach, feel my shoes start to sink in the stones and ice plants of the Mendocino coast, and it's seductive now, like a curved finger calling me over, over to vistas of two story waves and whale spout fountains, scenes of a sparkling sea of St. John's fire racing on the limbs of midnight tossed runaway redwoods, these great ancients dare another rampage, another cut of the saw, another rogue current…And I start to feel the memories rocking, rocking, rising with white flash of moon on ridge, on tide heavy winds that smell of evolution and urchin. The far Pacific in my opium years of mist and storm is always captured in these dreams, in these green house days…" Lamar writes with passion and panache and he is one of my favorite Lucid Moon poets. Enjoy his work and his upcoming cookbook Ginger, Lily and Sweet Fire.

Crimes Of The Beats by The Unbearables, $14 plus $3 postage, 1998, check made out Autonomedia, POB 568 Williamsburgh Station, Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568. Phone (718) 963-2603, e-mail at info@autonomedia.org. It is my pleasure to tell you about a hilarious and highly enjoyable collection of parodies and literary criticisms of our beloved Beat writers, called Crimes Of The Beats, by the Unbearables. The Unbearables are a group of anti-Beat writers who criticize and poke fun at Beat Culture. This book has short stories, essays, verse, drawings and photos by such artists as Tuli Kupferberg and Blair Wilson, whom I've published in Lucid Moon poetry magazine, and parodies/criticisms of such writers as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke and others. One parody had a group of suits building a robot of the late Allen Ginsberg, who spouts poetry and info about his book deals when they get him to work. Another favorite is a hilarious parody of Diane DiPrima's soft porn memoir Diary Of a Beatnik. It perfectly captures her nonchalant way of describing orgies. I met Diane last year at a rerelease book signing of Diary, and she promised to send me poems for Lucid Moon but forgot so I'm mad at her, so of course I relish with glee this ribbing. I just can't say enough about this book and I highly recommend it to all poets of any persuasion, the book is informative, critical, fun, hilarious and a must for your bookshelf.

Early Work 1970-1979, Poems by Patti Smith, W.W. Norton, 176 pages, 1994, $12, available at your local bookstore. This is a fine collection of punk indie rocker Patti Smith's poetry and prose from the 1970's. The work is highly imaginative, biting, and pungent with the sounds of rock and roll and the smell of sweat and sex. Most touching are the several tributes to 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud, my favorite poet also. Most famous is the review piece for Jim Morrison and The Doors' An American Prayer spoken poetry album, reprinted from Creem rock and roll magazine: The Scream Of The Butterfly (reflections on an american prayer jim morrison) i. (the dream) The man, a changeling, journeys across the radiant waste of the American west. There is a quake, a crack. He sprawls. He laughs. He sticks his prick into the jagged warp and spews his seed thru the hard red vein of the desert. He does not emerge. He cannot rise. He is caught in the mouth of the wilderness. Gestures of sound but no sound. There is to be silence before God. But he is not silent. This time the gestures explode into music. Into violence. He will not settle into a blissful jam. He is not occidental. He is the twisting remains of these united states. He desires not peace, but a piece of. He will not zip up, be good, shut up. He wants a bite. A slice of another life…" Patti writes more in fragments of prose than true poetry, and these are like sketches into her soul during the heyday of punk and rock. Required reading for those who were not there, and those who were but can't remember.

Eight Image Poems, Poetry mini-chap by Norman J. Olson, 10 pages, 2000, $2 from Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd, Maplewood, MN 55119-3635. Norman is a fine imagist poet, melding poems from seemingly disparate words that come together like a jumbled mind word salad. Galaxies Like Basketballs reads: "With galaxies bouncing like spiral basketballs through shadowy dreams, my electromagnetic eyeballs roll across the floor of the midnight sky. Frankenstein monsters cry like babies in the dark night of their sewn together ids. Shadows of vampires stick to mirrors like dust blown through the unseen webs of space and time. Ed Wood and Einstein have formulated my cosmology. Spiders and spidery space aliens tiptoe across the waves of the frozen North Atlantic and my eyeballs are spiral galaxies or electromagnetic receptors of beginnings already begun in slowly warping space and time." Norman's writing is not pretty, but it is pretty imaginative.

Leaving Only Impressions, poetry by Dianne Robitaille, 1999, $3 check made out to Ibbetson St. Press, 3 Ibbetson Street, Somerville, MA 02143. I enjoyed this chapbook and had not seen Dianne's poetry before. The writing is crisp, clear, succinct, and to the point, like a Raymond Carver short story. The emotions are heartfelt, soul-searching, honest and raw. So many good poems, impossible to capture the essence of this chap in just one poem excerpt, but I loved the ending poem, it was the most majestic: Lost Love reads: "If it were to be said that the night engulfs you, that all thoughts hang on old laundry cords--frozen with ice bits that knowledge is something privileged--a table setting for engaging friends sharing warm laughter if it were to be said that touch heals worn souls, and life, born in clay molds, forms sparks of glazing light setting ablaze willful love; that one's mind may expand then dive deep into life's seeding marrow; that naked eyes spanning one's lifetime may dispel of blind hindsight, then it would be a fair and good thing to lay on the ground, gently counting and gathering star bodies so they may be carefully held in one's pocket." Poetry of rare beauty and hard won truths, Dianne Robbitaille's Leaving Only Impressions is highly recommended. See Ibbetson Street Press's full page ad in my ad section for more quality chaps.

Nature Lovers, Poems by Charles Potts, 64 pages, 2000, $10 from Pleasure Boat Studios, 8630 NE Wardwell Road, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.Nature Lovers is a complex set of poems ostensibly about nature but more about man and our place in nature, given how we've managed to fuck it up with pollution and the rat race and daily living and "progress". Charles Potts is at times humourous, cranky and serious, and one senses a devious mind at work (and play). The Naming Of The Age reads: "Civilization is the exact distance between man and his excrement. Children are named when they are born, but ages acquire monikers with age, after their characteristics have been exposed. The Age Of Reason, The Enlightenment, The Pacific Century, for example. The last one perhaps a bit premature. Our own times have been referred to as : The Atomic Age, The Nuclear Age, the Space Age, The Age of Aquarius. But none of them stuck. The information Age is popular with people programmed on Alvin Toffler's wave theory who think "information explosion" describes the accumulated data many still prefer to duck. It is fitting since we are aging wrapped up in pollution, waste management, garbage, and sewage, to christen our age with a proper name. This is the age of excrement." Occasionally, a beautiful turn of phrase or a colorful idea that blows you away pops up, as in the ending of the poem Thus Spake Velikovsky: "Cheap Aristotelian armchair terrorism is no suitable substitute for discovering a mammoth caked in ice, its mouth still full of tropical flowers. "We need more poets like Charles Potts, real thinkers.

North Beach Revisited. Poetry book by A.D. Winans, 108 pages, 2000, $12.95 from Green Bean Press, P.O. Box 237, NYC 10013. A.D. Winans is a poet of the streets, and here he walks and talks and speaks the language of San Francisco nights in bars, coffeehouses, pool halls and cafes. 1962 reads: "The old Blackhawk booked the best jazz musicians of its day Getz, Mulligan, Diz to name a few I went there twice once with poet Jack Micheline Once with a young Latin woman to see Miles Davis blow his horn forced to sit in the teenager's section because my date was only seventeen sipping on a coke high on the high note smoke curling around the room in long lingering lazy circles. Sweet sax smooth sloe gin tenor my hand on warm thigh feeling cool feeling high bebop rhythms dancing inside my soul." With tributes to fellow poets and friends Jack Micheline and Bob Kaufman, this collection sings with the zing of jazz bebop poetry, a fine collection from the prolific Winans.

No White Horses, poetry chapbook by Nathan Graziano, 42 pages, 2000, $6 from Green Bean Press, P.O. Box 237, NYC 10013. More poetry about drinking , smoking and fucking, from a fine master of the form. Something Like Tonight reads "If tonight were different, something I could put my hands on and sculpt with my fingers, I'd make the sky darker and fuck the light out of the moon until it turned over and slept with its hips hurting. I'd strategically place a few more beers in the fridge and stop the clocks at two a.m. forever. I'd write a great poem for you and tear it up afterwards in a dumb haze of time. If tonight were different I'd have you here sitting between my legs with your head resting on my chest. I'd run my fingers through your hair and tell you it's two a.m. forever." Nathan writes poetry as if sculpting a loving portrait of a lover, and he imbues each poem with a fine sense of detail. He creates some chiascuro, light and shade, and touches the soul with his words. Now he needs to expand his subject matter horizons a bit, beyond drinking, smoking and fucking! Just kidding!

Poems From A Planet Called Alive! Poetry chapbook by Quint Bromlay, Scott Sussman, and David Mark Dannov. 66 pages, 2000, $6 check to David Mark Dannov, 776 Loma Ave, Long Beach, CA 90804. A fine collection of amusing So-Cal musings on modern day life by three poets who speak the language. The poetry is humorous and matter-of-factly presented. Quint Bromlay has a good one about what it's like to be a cat and to lick yourself for three hours a day. Scott Sussman chimes in with a funny musing about teaching young children, and David Mark Dannov has darker more vivid musings on life. His poem There Are So Many Canyons and Valleys In The Skin Of An Orange won First Place in the first Lucid Moon Contest . It ends with the cool line, "Picture a raindrop falling from a cloud and exploding into a galaxy called life." An intriguing collection overall, with a nice color cover.

Starting To End In The Middle, Poetry chapbook by Wade Vonasek, 32 pages, 2000, $6 from Four-Sep Publications, P.O. Box 12434, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 53212. Wade writes downbeat poetry for the downtrodden masses. His ideas are wild and scattered like garbage along the side of the highway of his mind…Most succinct and "together" is his poem Bob Marley: "Easy skanking over sneaky basslines that weave in and out with laid back loose pulse, a voice shines Jamaican sunlight speaking positive movements with Rasta heartbeat, Jah's dreadlocked knight with his spliff held high, relaxing the soul for the revolution and teaching a lesson to the uninitiated, living on through song the peaceful warrior never dies, mystic vibrations flow timelessly alive." Wade writes from the gut and manages a few indelible images that make this worth checking out.

Walk Out, Poetry chapbook by Ed Meek. 20 pages, 1999, $3 from Ibbetson St. Press, 33 Ibbetson St., Somerville, MA 02143. Ed Meek writes fine musings mostly on nature. A poem about the suicide of alternative grunge rocker Kurt Cobain sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the other poems about nature. Most amusing is the poem Pachysandra, or "Pack it in Cassandra" as his wife puts it, after pulling the plants out after they got too unwieldy. A serene, meditative collection of nature poems, well worth checking out.

         Please send in poetry chapbooks, books, cds, broadsides, and cassettes for review to Ralph Haselmann Jr., 67 Norma Road, Hampton, New Jersey, 08827. Include price including postage, who to make check out to, and address (where to order from). Also include a sase so I can tell you which issue it will be reviewed in. Publishers have my permission in advance to reprint any of my reviews as long as you send a me a copy of the issue it appears in.