Sung: Ink in love & lust.

 Sung: Ink in love & lust. 

Critical reactions:

This collection is a master class in brevity, an art not many poets are able to master. The short poems move effortlessly in the space of haiku with startling images that force the reader to go back and back again to find the gold in the lines.                                        

His prose poem experiments are like short, poetic novels - sublime, dreamlike in their intensity and eroticism.

This collection is fearless. It bristles with a unique vision of the world, love, lust and ultimately what it means to be human. [Gérard Rudolf, poet, Orphaned latitudes.]

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Raubenheimer’s voice is a unique one – a solitary one – one that is rarely heard in South Africa, or even rarely heard this side of consciousness. Some of these poems are like snapshots – short-lined, frequently employing eye-popping wordplay, but always with precision and economy of measure. They can be light-hearted and humourous, yet still cast a pebble into the depths of profundity or even blackness, fear, dark rituals – ‘the violence of magic’.

There is eroticism too, whether in the short-lined poems or the longer works – longer lines, greater in length – but again always with inventiveness, wordplay, and surreal imagery – ‘I sat atop her smile like a brief god taken flight’. And despite the brevity of some of the poems, they are not superficial reads and demand a careful, slow rereading, stepping over each word or image carefully like on stones in a rural stream or on ledges across dizzying crevices.  

[Gary Cummiskey, poet, editor Dye Hard Press.]

 

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How wonderfully inventive is language in this space. Raubenheimer tosses ideas, feelings, the natural world into a cauldron of imagery, captivating and freeing the senses from the lull of centuries, and throws open the secret passageways of love. His prose and verse sinuously glide off your skin, trapping eternities of bliss in synapses of longing. His pen shapes verse into wordless wonder so that the reader becomes lost in a mystical circle of life.

He knits tales of the Gods, in diaphanous swirls of galaxies and distils them into the throes of passion.

The writer is a puppet for the Muse. Her divine bidding bleeds out onto his page. How instantaneously he traverses time-frames, from prehistoric pangs to sacred couplings.

Lush language has been woven by a master artist into leaps of pure delight.

[Zena John, poet, Sanctum.] 

 

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Moving in a space between the blatant and the subtle, between whimsy
and passion, provocation and allurement, Raubenheimer's poems render
landscapes of desire and physicality through a word choice that
ensures each poem is a doorway to multiple possible epiphanies. In
contrast to a society that often forgets the very essences of desire,
in these pieces eros is foregrounded, and described, detailed,
narrated and evoked in the best poems through surprising contrasts and
verbal lines of flight. Often transgressive, these poems are fluid;
both in their rhythms and format, and in much of their imagery and
contents. Their movement and essentiality is perhaps summed up in the
poet's own words:
"in the confines of any one freed moment infinity rests – emancipation
from the linear: aesthetics."

 

[Kyle Allan, poet, editor New Coin poetry journal.]

Extracts:

Alchemy.

 

Using my most exotic

Selection of fonts

And brushes I

Carefully

Make her

Mouth

A poem.

 

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mikendruk.

 

and this silent weight ocean with its strange flesh like water

sliding along its particles to soft cleave quiet shape

the dead mass of continents

 

above in geometric flight from the sun

a moon conducts her tides, her swells

 

birds scattered along the big air

their wings beat by the intelligence of flight.

 

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Murmur.

 

I am too young for this world

too small and slow to straddle my language

direct and disease it toward the murmuring of silences:

I must grow in this blinding flux of sensations and visions with

bated heart

and wait for the thunder to slip into tongue

 

I must apply my blood as faint ears

and clumsy pry open eyes

with my odd

rhythms of accent

until I may rise over my ink

 

and thrust new days onto page.

 

***** 

 God lives in trees.

 

God lives in impossible skies

In children’s scampering laughter

And in the fond glow of pregnant women

God lives in churning seas and behind

Blind gulfs of stars

And in the snail slow working its way along that leaf

God lives in the mysterious fronds of orgasm,

And in hot, stinging tears and

The passionate intensity

of lovers’ eyes.

But mostly

And most fondly

God lives in trees.

 

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Craning time.

 

Outside
a Jurassic breeze
updates
floric lawns
while we
perpetuate
the ceremony of skin..

 

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Body song.

 

I’d always known

that the body was holy

and fuck

its sacred verse

but this was vague

an inner abstraction

- echo

along cranial skies –

until you arrived

collected it

in your perfect song

 

****** 

i.

The soul is the poetic
of the body reflexive

 

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Sung: Ink in love & lust is available to pre-order here: 

http://wp.blazevox.org/product/sung-ink-in-love-lust-by-mick-raubenheimer/ 

More details to follow once local and Amazon availability happens, yay!