Customer Reviews

Poems From My Bleeding Heart

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4 star:		(2)
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David Rehak (b. 1980?) is a Czech-Canadian author who's talent is in early bloom like Mary Shelley, Arthur Rimbaud or our own Jiri Wolker before him. Such literary and artistic cases and rare but not unheard-of. Apparently his mother went through very difficult delivery and he was born dead for some minutes but miraculously revived. As a little boy he must have grew up hard in corruption and oppression of the Communist regime which no doubting shaped his views on freedom and censorship in adult life.The regime was giving his parents problems so they escaped to Canada. In Canada his family's fortunes improved. There he lived most his life. Now recently he is back in Europe after his university courses are interrupted due to failing health. I see him as pitiable figure, broken by nervous disorder and years of drug-use and debauchery -- probobly convalescing in some hospital or prison.

Now let me tell you about this book.....!

Wow! what a thought-provoking and brilliant and entertaining collection of poems is this by a troubled, sensitive, wise young personality torn between his base sensual impulses and his noble spiritual aspirations. It is a man who loves love, loves God, loves Good, but is burdened by overpowering temptations and knows too much about all forms of human evil, the occult, social corruption and sexual perversion, death and decay. It is like Baudelaire come back from the dead. It is like Ginsberg bitching about about life around him. It is Buk recounting his love-affairs or Eminem busting dysfunctional rhymes or rants. By writing such brutally honest and intimate and private poems, Rehak is really taking his clothes off in front of bunch of strangers and laying his heart bare. These poems are so colorful and powerful..... so phenomenal. Some of them are breath-taking. All of them are easy to understand without they being simplistic. It's a good mix of prose-poems and metrical verse. The poetic language and expression is those of a master who wish to convey interesting and witty and controversial ideas and incidents but is at same time self-conscious about being well-understood. This is the poetry book for people who hate poetry. They will easily understand each phrase. This book should also be in every contemporary poetry-lover's library. POEMS FROM MY BLEEDING HEART is a landmark work that will rank along with other fine controversial poetic masterpieces like Ginsberg's HOWL or Baudelaire's THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. It will live. Why? Because it is THAT great and it is THAT accessible. I hope in my heart his talent will get the kind of reading audience it deserves. Thank you for your time.

Dave had sent me some of his poems to read before I read the entire collection. His favorites were not my favorites. But after giving the book a much deserved slow read, I found many pieces of high and promising quality.

I'm a little older than Dave, twenty some years. So the youthful charms have long passed, as have the days of idealistic romance. I have settled into a quiet fire of true and deep love. So when I read some of Dave's wild fire poems, I don't click. That's not to say they're not well done.

However, when Dave hits on a subject of more mature love and intimacy, he hits a homerun. Some truly beautiful imagery and insights. His Ginsberg influence in obvious at times, but always in his own style and words. So they work and are not imitations.

His more political pieces are also quite relevant and insightful. He's very good at giving one liners that have either an afterglow or an extended shelf life of intellectual value.

Why didn't I give the book five stars? Like all poets, there are some pieces not up to par with the rest. But that's ok. I'd be happy for only a few excellent pieces, Dave's gives us many.

David Rehak's novels are compelling, sometimes shocking, and always written in his own distinct voice. His work is often daring, skating along the edges of familiar literary concepts. This book of confessional prose poetry comes from the same place in Rehak's psyche. Nothing is too sacred or profane to be an object of his Muse. Whether rhyme, free verse, or prosaic processes, his poems run the gamut from sweet to solemn, erotic to irreverent, laced with generous doses of humor.

"On the Death of a Friend" was one of my favorites because of its offset rhyming words and the sound of it when read aloud:
Death has coiled you round him too soon
In arms as dark as the hours of the moon,
In his soft, oblivious,
cozy cocoon,
Just to prove that flesh is never impervious.

"Deceitful Age" is another favorite because of the different spin and varying poetic styles Rehak uses to make his point:
In this deceitful age,
Even liars elude shame;
And where is the public outrage
When the wrongdoer escapes blame?

Political leaders, you are failed saviors!
Political analysts, you are gloom-and-doom prophets!
Citizens, you are gullible victims!
And the world keeps spinning on its axis,
And Time keeps on ticking in the brain of its clock.

"A Noble Savage" is this poet's contemplation on the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley:
O noble savage
Of a twisted science!
You remind us of dangers
Like genetic engineering;
When man tampers with nature,
He pays an unaffordable price!

Rehak's thoughts are often morbid as he contemplates his death or the death of others. Sometimes he finds a disconcerting humor in the misbegotten misfits of a hypocritical society. And every so often lovers of poetic metaphor will be delighted, as in this excerpt from "At the Beaches of Normandy":
as soon as we hit soil, the bullets hit us,
we were like wasps in the winter
of this furious flurry of fire.
Or in this excerpt from "Autumn Rain":
And branches fearfully waved
Their every red-clad hand
Under teary-eyed clouds
And the pounding fist of thunder.

David Rehak takes readers on a whirlwind tour of his world in Poems From My Bleeding Heart. These are sometimes ribald and rollicking messages of bleeding pleading or poignant observations of hope and despair. It's David Rehak, as he is and how he thinks, as man and poet.

I found the poems in this book to be highly provocative and eye-opening to be sure. Not boring in the least - which, by the way, is a good thing. I particularly liked The Recherché Eroticism Of Great Writers & Artists. All were extraordinarily poignant and thought provoking - the very antithesis of banal.

Some will say he is not T.S. Eliot, and yet. Some will say he is not Walt Whitman, and yet. Some will say he is not Allan Ginsberg, and yet. Do we know who is going to be the T.S. Eliot, the Walt Whitman or the Allan Ginsberg of this 21st century ? Not I, not me, not myself, and that makes three. And yet I like his poems. They are easy to read and yet somewhat enigmatic. They speak of horrible events in our life, known as AIDS or DEATH, and yet they are full of light, even the dark light of the night, or « the hours of the moon » as he calls it. And yet I prefer the night when there is no moon. He speaks of LOVE and seems to like it, though his girlfriend should rince her hair more when she washes it to avoid « its shampoo scents », though he likes them. We can imagine him going around and sniffing on shampoo all day long. After all some sniff glue. Funny. And not ah ah. He drinks beer, but it has to be cheap beer because the only memory he keeps of it is the fluid flow of exhaust he gets out of it. I prefer a beer that I can remember because of its taste, its bitterness, its fleshy body and its bodily aroma. But well, some people in the world are deprived of Belgian, northern English or Irish beers. He loves anecdotes, and most of them have to do with love - or is it sex ? - and they cover the whole spectrum/spectra of possibilities one could imagine. This is not politically correct, but sexually it is definitely enticing, even if all that is presided over by the « Priestesses of promiscuity ». Poetry has not reached, and will never reach, what Arthur C. Danto has selfrighteously called the « end of art », quite wrongly indeed. Poetry that has to do with words, everchanging words in an everchanging society, will never come to an end, except if people, or should I say men and women, and particularly children, all became deaf and dumb, mute and silent. This, luckily will never happen, and David Rehak is like a light in a storm that tells us there is someone living there, overthere and beyond that can read since he needs a light. I have many questions to ask and I would like to hear David Rehak reading his own poetry. Is he that sure there is a difference, at least the difference he states, between a Catholic, a Protestant, a Eunuch or a Teacher ? They all sound to me to be particularly twisted and, to use his language « f**ked up » (sorry, in French in the text) by the accidents of life. Read it, you will enjoy it, I'm sure.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rehak is the best Czech poet since nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert. A real poet of the people! He has a few strong opinions and some of the content shocked me in more ways than one, but this fellow really has a superlative understanding of human nature and a magnificently witty and lucid style of expression. I was greatly impressed and perfectly delighted by page after page after page of this book.

This books is great. Im so happy that i ordered it, i have read it a few times and i just love. great book.