Byline: Subterranean Blue Poetry (www.subterraneanbluepoetry.com)
Title of Book: Mavericks
Author: Strider Marcus Jones
Publisher: Strider Marcus Jones
Date of Publication: 2009
Page Count: 69
“It’s been seven hours and fifteen days
Since u took your love away
I go out every night and sleep all day
Since u took your love away”
- from Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinead O’Connor
Lovelorn Summer heat and the Celtic beat . . . Mavericks by Strider Marcus Jones is a study in the alchemy of New Age Renaissance poetics and language. Strider Marcus Jones lives in Paris. He is a Poet/Musician/Law Graduate/retired Civil Servant born in Salford England, his family originally from Ireland and Wales. He is widely published online, in journals and in anthologies. Poet Jones has written 5 books of poetry, Mavericks is the first book of poetry This Writer has reviewed for him.
This poetry is an event in love themes, romance, sometimes sexual imagery, often expressing want and not. Perhaps the violence of ended covenants, as if the undertoad of Western culture raises it’s Medusa’s head. Woven into the Celtic lyric lilt are nature images, flowers, jasmine, leaves, trees, berries the landscape of forest walks in poetry. The original use of language as music, new allusions and sometimes original words create an art nouveau poetic experience.
“STAYING IN THE JASMINE
i'm falling,
falling into jasmine,
someone, who is, has been
put back on the shelf.
i'm calling,
calling from the jasmine,
sounding, like i have been
part of someone else:
not as the me, i used to be,
who did the doubts, of in and out,
not knowing, what i was about
hiding behind stealth
a favourite raindrop in the sun was he,
coming down and straight back up, without
a word when finding others out
suspicions kept inside this self.
i'm stalling,
stalling in the jasmine,
knowing who was, is seen
as more than something else.
i'm staying,
staying in the jasmine,
making truer roots, than these have been
out of something else.”
The entire presentation is magical, using various forms of rhyme creating cadence, discord and mystery. The Poet is the alchemist, through various experiments with rhyme stirring the pot, in search of the perfect poem. The poetry presents different forms of rhyme, from rhyming couplets to end of lines a – b – a rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, repetitive words, amongst others, that regularly flow through each poem. It is a rich cadence, considered, sophisticated, creating a whole earth affect. It’s danger is to fall into over familiarity, it’s height is a magical take on poetic dance which it achieves more often than not, as if on the wings of peace.
“BARK
what's the point of crying into me
but i can see,
to set you free.
don't you know
i did this long ago,
by turning songs off the radio.
silence is the bark
around my ark,
i wear it on, to eat the dark
and to keep out the images
of once shared symmetries,
standing, like stone circle cemeteries
in the open air, made
for the wind and rain to fade,
for the sun's bleach and icy blade
to erase it all,
to forget its fall,
to remove its face, from beauty's wall.”
Staring in the face of free verse Modernism, the return to beauty with the Post-Moderns and now the return to rhyme in the New Age. As if the rebirth of civilization with the ease of information flow, the Holy Spirit tenets, in the Online Society is calling the Poet into higher climes of romance and the quest for karmic purity, the quest for the ideal, in all things peace. His influences are largely Celtic Poets, Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost as well as Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda. Evolving from the Modernist, “God is dead” post WW II epoch into the era of dance with the introduction of regular rhyme, it is as if the poetry is evolving into the Internet journey of Zen and home.
“THE VASE
standing silent proud,
alone, or in a crowd
life glazed mood and skin
outside and in
for you, i think out loud
and take you in
where thoughts abound reversible
and convertible
where saying being wrong
reaches out beyond
the natural need to win.
moulded by my hands
to this shape that understands;
its cloth of clay holds you warm,
a mummer masked in costumes storm
react with its receptacle of reason
for sorting truths from treason,
but you don't need to have a season
to put your flowers into me
swaying here, in wind and wild, as born so be.”
This poetry speaks of hope and dance as the lyric rhythm, trees in summer breezes that move against the sky. Fantastical New Age Celtic poetry, Mavericks by Strider Marcus Jones.
Genre: Poetry, New Age
