Customer Reviews

The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Clark Ashton Smith isn't for everyone, but his romantic & otherworldly poems, full of sensual, exotic words and crammed with bizarre images, are, in my opinion, among the most underrated poems of the 20th century. Primarily remembered (if at all) for his stories and his association with Lovecraft, Smith was a highly original and idiosyncratic writer, visual artist and (above all) poet, a creative artist whose imagination puts him in a league with the likes of Goya, Baudelaire or Scriabin. Smith did not care about academic trends in poetry - not a modernist, he was more of an antimodernist. I guess you could classify him as a symbolist, but he mostly was concerned with expressing his inner visions, at making connections (like Lovecraft) between the human imagination and the cosmic.

This is an excellent selection of Smith's poetry - some favorites include "The Hashish Eater," ""The Witch in the Graveyard" and "A Vision of Lucifer." An added plus is the color reproductions of Smith's paintings, which are even harder to find than his poems. The editors and publisher are to be commended.

5.5" x 8.5" softcover book. 194 pages.

Most people might know the name Clark Ashton Smith for his forays into short fiction. These endeavors placed him within the trinity of Weird Tales authors, a position shared with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Though few might recognize him as the "poetic prodigy on the order of Keats and Shelley" he was announced as in 1912 (at the tender age of 19) by "readers and critics alike". Under the guidance of George Sterling, at the time "the reigning literary figure of San Francisco", Smith blossomed into what he should be recognized as: "one of the premier American poets of the twentieth century".

Included within the pages of The Last Oblivion one finds Smith's full array of poetic work: the esoteric and exotic languages, the imaginative and fantastical landscapes, and the precise metrical tone harkening back to the classical masters of the field. Included aside Smith's various odes and elegies are poems regarding the fantastical realms of Zothique, Averoigne, and Atlantis; locales that Smith readers will surely recognize from his short stories.

Excellent book! This is some of the best poetry you'll find anywhere, and its publication is a reason to rejoice! CAS excelled at a very dark and beautiful poetry and some of his best pieces are in here. It has some unreprinted material, as well as some poems that have seen very little light in the past. Great production values and three nice, full color paintings. I highly reommend it!

maybe the best way to describe the poetry of C.A.S. But in a good way. Colourful and lively. Exotic and dreamlike. Other worlds and of this world lost in oblivion.

Imagine Charles Baudelaire as an American a century later and living in a cabin in the woods of California. Imagine him calling himself Clark Ashton Smith. Imagine the critics and the academics completely ignoring him. The result would be something like what you get with this volume. "Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams. I crown me with the million-colored sun of secret worlds incredible ..."