Customer Reviews

Disturbing Muses

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Mike Allen, Disturbing Muses (Prime, 2005)

There's one thing that can certainly be said for Mike Allen: the man has serious amounts of raw talent. It may not always be fully realized in these poems, but it's always recognizable.

Allen's writing has the pseudo-baroque twist to it found in the stuff that's been coming out from the mythpunk crowd recently, but Allen separates himself with his ties to ekphrasis; whereas the mythpunks are steeped in ancient times, Allen's focus on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seems positively mundane. He also likes to stick close to his subjects. I have yet to decide whether this is a strength or a weakness, but I'm leaning towards the former.

What really gets me confuse in this book, time and again, is the rhyme scheme. The language and diction point towards the poetry being formal, but if Allen is using a rhyme scheme here at all, it's either hopelessly byzantine or inconsistent. And once again I find myself confused. If it's hopelessly byzantine, all Allen needs to do to propel himself into the ranks of the very, very good is to streamline things a bit. If it's inconsistent, however, he's breaking one of the unbreakable rules of good poetry ("either it rhymes or it doesn't; poems that rhyme inconsistency are the sign of a lazy poet."), and should get slammed for it. Most of the time it's just impossible to tell, but with some sections, repeated reading has made it more clear there's at least some sort of rhyme scheme. Again, I'm inclined to give Allen the benefit of the doubt, but not so liberally as last time.

As for the writing itself, it's quite good:

Poor sleepless boy, doomed to fail school,
sent by his vexed parents to live seaside
for his health (to no avail) but the dreams,
the longing for order, symmetry,

spilled through his hands to crystallize
in press and ink.
("Escher's Bed")

See what I mean? Good, solid meat-and-potatoes stuff instead of the ethereal flitting about one might expect given the press. Oddly, Allen does wander off into the vague a time or two (especially towards the end of his Picasso piece, which reads like the summary section of a high school research paper in places), but not enough to bring the entire book down.

An interesting collection, worth looking into; Allen has the potential to become a household name, with a bit of spit and polish, and you might as well be able to say you knew him when. ***