Customer Reviews

Creep to Death

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Joseph Payne Brennan is one of the best kept secrets of 20th century poetry, up there with the greats of modern verse's nay-sayers--Leopardi, Trakl, Larkin. This is a collection that exudes pure pain from the first line to the last, and one would be hard pressed to find a poet who can match the ethereal chokehold of doom Brennan manages to lay on the reader in a single poem. His determination to communicate the agony and ennui of existence is unremitting and boy, does he succeed. These poems are not merely self pitying cries of pain: they have real substance and a vision of the world that is disarmingly honest to say the least. His remorseless existential statements are not pretentious at all and have the subtlety of a sickly snake sliding up for the final diseased bite:

"Down you go,
a tag on your toe

flat on your back
in a canvas sack

you're bound to fit
in our bulldozed pit

smug by night's eternal shore
. . .you and twenty-seven more.

a very few years,
with no trace of tears

WE'LL DIG YOU UP AND BURN YOUR BONES!

. . .mister anonymous nobody jones. . ."

This sort of nursery rhyme sing-song dementia is used to maximum effect. Brennan is a poet who has been shoved into a closet of undeserved obscurity, and it is time all lovers of the genuinely downcast and doomy in poetry open the damn door.