McAllister's Mates Thirty Four
Hi all
This week I return to my first love poetry with two finely detailed and beguiling poems from Misty Violet and Luciana Moroianu.
These reviews are part of Reviewstack run by the great writer and pillar of the Substack Community : Thaddeus Thomas
McAllister’s Mates - An ongoing series of reviews of some of the wonderful articles, poems, and stories I’ve discovered on Substack (and other places) and more importantly the beautiful souls behind the works.
P.S Subscribe for your chance to get your work reviewed here! Next round of open submissions starts Monday 27th April.
Please take a few moments to read the works of these authors, artists, and creators and if you find their work as life-affirming and life changing as I do, then please let them know. We need to support and cherish these voices.
You can meet some of my other friends in the previous instalments: 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If you want to keep me in caffeine (and keep the ghostly voices whispering for the poetry side of things) - consider clicking below. For any who do so, you have my deepest gratitude.
Luciana Moroianu
This is a fascinating exercise in combining ethereal, delirious surrealism with rich, sensuous physicality. The Poem’s structure heightens this duality and tension by using a double form. Luxurious meandering tercets are intersected by punchy singular statements. This approach highlights the strengths of poetry as a medium where writers are freed from the restraints of conventional sentence structure and paragraphing. Luciana capitalises on this opportunity with gusto, the single statements and the tercets wrestle and dance, perhaps in struggle for dominance, perhaps reaching to embrace each other. The formatting, much like the imagery of the lyrics explores and challenges our psychological split of emotions from intellect, and imagination from momentary experience.
The imagery is thoughtful, layered, and highly ambitious. A vast library of punchy, visceral physical metaphors shares the stage with dreamy ethereal whisperings. Both of which are inventive using traditional symbols in inventive ways while also creating a new library of idioms with subjective meanings for the reader to unlock. I think what impresses me most about the piece is how all these complexities of form and symbol are guided into a flowing whole. The tangents of thought reach like branches from a tree, sharp and diverse but natural outgrowths of a living movement. As I mentioned earlier, the effect is very much like a dance where limbs might strike out or flash in rapid movement, but always in adherence to the song’s guiding melody.
While I firmly believe there are many and layered interpretations of a piece like this - my personal takeaway is that we must navigate our relationship to self with all the nuance, tools, and curiosity that we bring to our dealings with others. Perhaps our internal relationships are even more labyrinthine, maybe we love, fear, and rage against ourselves more than anyone else in the world. Some might say most of our dealings with the world are theatrical projections of our inner wrestles with the simians and seraphims that guide and grapple our minds. I take Luciana’s beautiful poetry to be gentle yet cunning with our contrary natures, to accept no lies from within yet understand why we weave false narratives and find the truth within them. Pray tell what colours are our thoughts? All of them.
Misty Violet
There are many poems channelling various cultural mythologies and symbols to varying degrees of success and originality. This one does something different. Misty Violet seeks to get behind that process, not sure much a discussion on how specific historical events gave rise to legends, but a movement into the liminal space between the landscape and our imaginations.
There are so many dry and reductionist texts about myths and legends, where these ancient stories are dismissed as political narratives of a conquering army, or an externalisation of their author’s neurosis. This poem achieves a more sensitive, human, and holistic meditation on the process of myth making in a much smaller space.
The opening speaks of a guiding hand through a wintry landscape of harsh stones and glittering snow. I’m not entirely sure that we’re seeing a conversation between two people, at least not in the usual literal sense. What is clear, however, is the recurring theme of attention as an act of creation.
The verses speak of a strength (maybe even a consciousness?) shared by the sky, the stones, and the snow “Should you stop yourself there at the mercy of air”. So these deities seem to lie within the natural world, waiting on the spark of human imagination. But we must be fully present: body, mind, and soul at the wilder places of both the physical and metaphysical worlds. Then the giants become known to us, created or unveiled by an act of creative attention.
As to these giants, do they command, grant wishes, or tell secrets? No. They have their own task sculpting those physical and metaphysical worlds. Even if these beings are birthed from our imaginations, are we so arrogant as to think this talking self pushes and pulls the wells of deep memory, emotions and unspoken desires where the imagination lives? We see the giants and they see us, a gaze meeting gaze. Eternity staring into boundlessness. The giants see who we are, past what the world wishes us to be, past what conditioning tells us to be, past even what we imagine ourselves to be. They see the self that surprises even you on those days when you shake yourself from the daydream - awed or shaken by what you saw in your deepest recesses. Follow Misty Violet’s giants - unfix your gaze from “the whistling grave”.
I hope you enjoy these beautiful works as much as I enjoyed reading and writing about it.
You can meet some of my other friends in the previous instalments: 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Substack has proven to be a treasure trove and I already have a few more gifted writers lined up for my next review newsletter.
P.S Subscribe for your chance to get your work reviewed here! Next round of open submissions starts Monday 27th April.
You can also claim your FREE book of Poetry and art Hypnos Hermes - an epic poem presented as a medieval manuscript. A fantastical story written in verse enriched by many colourful and vibrant artworks.
If you want to keep me in caffeine (and keep the ghostly voices whispering for the poetry side of things) - consider clicking below. For any who do so, you have my deepest gratitude.