Customer Reviews

Satan is a Mathematician: Poems of the Weird, Surreal and Fantastic

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Here is Satan is a Mathematician, a collection of poems, dating from as far back as 1980, but mostly from the 1990's, which cover a wide range of subjects, science-fictional, fantastical, horrific, and scientific. Keith Allen Daniels is an interesting poet, and at the high end of his range is very fine.

The book is subtitled "Poems of the Weird, Surreal, and Fantastic", which is pretty much what we get. In a previous draft of this review I dithered about trying to define "SF poetry", or "Fantastic poetry". To some extent I was interested in disproving the existence of such a beast: after all, poetry is about sound and emotion (and ideas), and at least the first two seem not to be definable in genre terms. But then, some poems really are about ideas, and ideas, famously, are the stuff of much science fiction. And some emotions are perhaps best evoked by images from SF or the fantastic. A trivial conclusion, I'm afraid. I will say, though, that it seems to me that I read poetry of all sorts for the same reasons: sound and emotion, while I read science fiction, at times, for explicitly different (neither superior or inferior) reasons than I read mainstream fiction. Enough, though. What of the poems at hand?

One of my favorites is "The Poetasters' Cafe", which takes a harsh look at the contemporary "coffeehouse" fashion for poetry readings and overly confessional writing. It's a fine poem, but it's not SF, unless the use of vocabulary such as "coelecanth" and "phagocyte" is sufficient to so mark a poem. On the other hand, "Sciomancy Nights", another fine effort, uses an explicitly fantastical device, raising the spirits of the dead to speak to them, to consider, in a slightly humorous manner, four historical figures (Bierce, Archimedes, Aldous Huxley, Lincoln). Another angle Daniels uses is pure science: "The Discourse of the Stones" imagines "deep time" through the history of rock. Not SF poetry, perhaps, but "geology poetry".

On the whole these are interesting poems. Occasionally Daniels seems to believe that an exotic use of vocabulary is sufficient to make a sequence of words poetry; on other occasions, the poems seem not much but doggerel. But that is to complain about the lesser works of what is, after, quite a long collection by poetry standards. The best poems here are very good. For example, "Leap to Infinity" is a lovely double haiku: "A doe's leg, fractured/ in mid-leap and torn in half/ hangs from the barbed wire. On the ground beneath/ her body has fallen far/ behind her spirit." Or the fine extended metaphor in "Lithic": "in caverns of the forebrain/ suffering forms grottos/ of fanciful dripstone ...". Or from "The Poetasters' Café": "There the poets are mired in self/ like insects in pitcher plants/ of their own device."

Anyone interested in contemporary poetry would do well to check out this book. And if you are also interested in SF and fantasy, attuned to the vocabulary and images of science and "the weird, surreal, and fantastic", you'll be even more likely to be attracted by Keith Allen Daniels' favored image sets.