Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compilation of Shaumyan's best, March 3, 2005
Alexander Shaumyan's trademark is wry or self-effacing humor, heart rending psalms of loneliness and love, and cynical commentaries on modern times. Each of his four books is different, however, and Spirit of Rebellion is exceptional for the addition of prose. The stream of consciousness prose in "It was a Long and Lonely Night" was first rate. But as always, it is his deeply felt poetry that shines.
"Just Once" expresses Shaumyan's deep loneliness:
Just once I want to feel free from this depression,
Just once.......
O to feel the sadness of the naked Moon,
to touch the needles of despair, to hug the stones of pain.
Tonight dress me in black velvet and hang me upon a
cross.
In "O God, I Could Never Create" he cries out for an Earth and a humanity he longs to rescue:
But I can kiss the Earth, breathing Love into
this once infertile soil,
And I can make this paper into music,
"To a Poet Who Looks for Dinosaurs in His Toilet Bowl" mixes Shaumyan's bizarre humor with the poet's hope:
.....that verbal acrobat playing
with images and words
that spread a magic veil
over the world of anguish,
loneliness and despair --
He rails hopelessly against the world's ugliness and sorrow in "Some Thoughts on War and Human Ugliness":
I'm not in my right mind and
I cannot write poetry amidst it all --
as if something inside me has been
cut --
As always, he dreams of desire, love and hope, but tempers these thoughts with harsh realism, as in "With Years":
With years your drive goes down
And your soul
Becomes accustomed to the daily grind --
With years you, too, become a local clown
Indifferent to everything and blind.
Alexander Shaumyan is a prolific poet who writes in a wide range of styles on a multitude of subjects. His work is well worth contemplating.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spirit of Rebellion by Alexander Shaumyan, October 29, 2007
Spirit of Rebellion by Alexander Shaumyan
It isn't often that a reviewer gets to read such delightful, enriching work as that of poet, Alexander Shaumyan, and I am the recipient of 8 of his published works. All are excellent. Spirit of Rebellion could almost be considered autobiographical, but then, that could be said of any poet's work, each a tiny window into the poets soul. This is true of Shaumyan's work as well. He gives the reader that sometimes fine line between what is important and what isn't. He writes wistfully, challengingly and tragically of the absurdities of life in this volume, and those meaningless things, which somehow have crept into our awareness through skilled marketing and soundbites, and shows us just how absurd they really are.
It was difficult in reviewing, to pick favorites, for out of context each poem of Shaumyan's loses the collective emotion and insight his work as a body holds. His titles alone are insightful and at times so amusing, you are drawn to the page to read his work. Ex: As I Walk Through the Bookstores of Madness; A Spontaneous Idea for a Poem or How Is Your Soul; and Mel Bought 100% Snow Tires. And then, there are these of a more serious nature: What Is Love; The Soul of Modern Man; and the title work, The Spirit of Rebellion, first verse which has to be [one of ] my favorites,
The moon is full, the night is young,
I could be mad, I could be drunk,
I could be just another fool -
You were always telling me...
And yet I know in my heart
That you and I were meant to part,
And all that matters
Is the spirit of rebellion.
To read Shaumyan is to read poetry.
Professor Gerald Smith at Oxford University [New College] in England, teaches `Spirit of Rebellion' in a graduate seminar there, as part of course work in modern Russian literature and Russian emigre literature and its reception abroad. His was an excellent choice to study, because Alexander Shaumyan is one of the finest poets of the 21st century, in this reviewer's humble opinion.
E. Lucas-Taylor, author, poet
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