Alchemy of Opposites: Poems [Paperback]

Clifton Snider (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Chiron Review Pr (July 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0943795400
• ISBN-13: 978-0943795409
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,706,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Clifton Snider is the internationally-acclaimed author of nine books of poetry, including The Age of the Mother (Laughing Coyote, 1992), The Alchemy of Opposites, and Aspens in the Wind (Chiron Review Press, 2000 and 2009). His novel about the bisexual frontman for a 1980's new wave/punk rock band, Loud Whisper, was published in 2000 by Xlibris Corporation. His coming out/coming of age novel, Bare Roots, was published in 2001 by Xlibris, as was his latest autobiographical novel, Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers, about two gay brothers, Pentecostal preacher's sons, one of whom disappears under ominous circumstances.

His poetry and prose have been translated into French and Russian. His poems, fiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, the Advocate, the Gay and Lesbian Review, Worldwide, Blue Mesa Review, Psychological Perspectives, the Wildean, and Mt. Aukum Review.

He is a literary critic who specializes in Jungian/archetypal and Queer Theory. His book, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature, was published by Chiron Publications in 1991.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems of Transformation, April 1, 2005

By 

James Benedict "James Benedict" (Denmark) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Alchemy of Opposites: Poems (Paperback)

The subject matter of Clifton Snider's delightful collection of poems The Alchemy of Opposites is, as suggested by the title and the cover illustration - a cave painting from the Niaux cave - couched in experience related to archetypal subjects. Written on the premise that profound experience can be found wherever we are, if only we care to look, the poems span a wide variety of themes divided into seven sections, which partly indicate their chronology and partly their thematic content.

The central underlying theme of the collection is the mysterious disappearance of Snider's older brother Evan Allan Snider - also the subject matter of his autobiographical novel Wrestling with Angels (Xlibris, 2001). The elegy `A Last Good-bye' on one of the opening pages attempts to come to terms with the lack of data surrounding his brother's presumed death and the realization that the mystery will never be solved. This painful situation is the subliminal point of departure for the collection, which consists mainly of a sequence of strong poems dealing with loss interspersed with nature poems, poems on art and artists, poems of love and friendship, spirit of place, etc.
Inevitably the subject of the poet's brother bleeds into extended elegies on lost significant others; from a Norwegian cousin in the poem `Holocaust', a student activist who was deported during the German occupation of Norway, to `Homomonument' describing the pink granite triangles, near the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, commemorating Hitler's gay holocaust. A host of AIDS lost lovers and friends are also remembered in the collection, as in the poem `Survivor':

The loss of a hundred
once familiar faces,
faces that blend into one black space
like the entrance to a cave
a bat cave with guano rotting,
exuding ammonia, poisonous to human breath. (18)

The profound healing process engaged in the poem is negotiated in the alchemical terms of the nigredo (the blackening) and the putrefactio (the rotting). These are initial stages in the alchemical process, whose goal in Jungian terms was not the making of the material gold, but rather the philosophical gold. Jung translated this concept with the term `individuation' and defined it as `the integration of unconscious strata into consciousness', stressing that the process, not the end result, is the central preoccupation in alchemy. This is also Snider's main project, though of course direct references to the time-honoured process can also be found (in `Le Mont St. Michel'): `The lights turn stone into gold...' (138)
The poem `Survivor' opens the theme of AIDS related deaths which surfaces with regular intervals throughout the collection. The once familiar faces disappear into the black space likened to a transformative cave - a metonym for the alchemical crucible. Subsequently the cave-crucible fills with rotting raw material and vile poisonous airs signalling the putrefactio, related to the nigredo, both initial stages of the alchemical process. Here the alchemist traditionally works his way through a profound depression, projecting his unresolved emotions into the operations of the process. Just as a seed crystal of gold was traditionally added as enzyme to transform the raw material, darkened by initial combustion in the crucible, the poet's philosophical integration and voicing of the horror belabours the depression, while the primal matter graduates from ammonia to oxygen. The oxygen in the cave-crucible (complemented by the Niaux cave ox image on the cover) reflects the philosophical gold of the reference myth of alchemical transformation and stresses the processual nature of Snider's collection: Alchemy is continually engaged in his poetry whose sustained focus is on healing through dynamic experience, insight, and love, as celebrated in `Hanging On' and the eponymous poem `The Alchemy of Opposites', both dedicated, like the collection itself, to Snider's Guatemalan companion. Here the traditional heterosexual opposition, the mysterium coniunctionis of the alchemist and his mystic sister celebrated in the reference myth, is translated to an intermale nexus of `mestizo fire and Nordic reserve' (130).
The cave-crucible theme of alchemical transformation resurfaces in the collection's final sector `Spelunker'. Here Snider's passion for speleology is charted in direct and metaphorical ways. The poem `The Cave of Niaux' finds the artist as a spectator in sacred vaults of Neanderthal and Cro Magnon worship in France:

From these cold, faceted walls,
messages from a prehistoric past.
The paintings speak to my living heart...(140)

The shared visual experience graduates to a numinous participation mystique. While realizing that there is no return to authentic experience on this `pilgrimage to the past' (140), art still attracts as parable. In the previous poem `Spelunker' Snider describes the passion with which he negotiates archival caves in a quest for self-knowledge, uncovering data `like prehistoric notations that I must learn to read' (137). The final poem in the collection `The Cave of Niaux', ends on a processual note, a dedication to a collective numinous moment, which, in accordance with its alchemical reference icon, the philosophical stone, is ephemeral:

We gather torches and trek back,
different now, bonded,
purposeful, if only for the moment.
The opening blinds like a blast. (141)

The author relates the experience of the archetypal paintings in the cave, a becoming metaphor for the unconscious, to his own syncretistic (Christian/Amerindian) rituals, and reborn from the underworld he returns to diurnal matters. The evocative poem, which metonymically describes the poet's quest, is rich in classical intertexts such as the myths of Demeter and Persephone, the Eleusinian mysteries, Orpheus and Eurydiche, Tammuz and Ishtar, and of course the appropriate man-to-man epic of the Babylonian Gilgamesh.
On a different level Snider's Zuni fetish collection poems relate to the subject of healing through creativity. They are reminiscent of Bruce Chatwin's Utz whose main character towards the end of the novel realizes the psychological implications of his passion for collecting: It is a therapeutic protection against loss. Snider's poems do not point to this; clearly he is immersed in the profoundly traumatic task of coming to terms with loss, a process augmented by research into the deepest layers of the psyche, which he mediates by writing, recording personal microhistories, sublime and prosaic epiphanies in nature, art, the quotidian, building a home with his lover, collecting, etc.
Snider's theoretical and practical focus on alchemy as a vessel of healing and individuation is part of the tradition of alchemical revival initiated by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, and explored by Patrick White, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc. In this chronicle of spiritual work related to loss and grief Snider's stamina shines through every poem, giving a new meaning to the term `healing fiction', which, as described by James Hillman, is a significant contemporary variation on the alchemical process.

I respect the author's focus on the apparent chronological sequencing of the poems. However, I would have preferred a comprehensive thematic structuring of the poems into for example elegies, poems of love and friendship, ekphrastic poems, poems about artists, animal poems (often related to the Australian poet Les Murray's work), poems of place, etc. There are many poignant poems and important graphics of fin-de-siècle gay sensibility in this collection and I suspect that the cumulative effect of a thematic ordering would add to the pleasure of reading Snider's work and the profound insights it shares.