Her darling light quiet now, receding/ too dim for shadow; her open eyes/ unpuddled by grief, light on nothing/ as her dust flicked lashes/ untwitched, wait ready/ Is this poise, or something less?

"Laundry and Grief". This is classic Zegans. Immediate sensory images, dangerous yet alluring eroticism, truthful, and sadly, often regrettable intuition into the hearts and consciousness of others;  As  his cd, “Night Work”, ufolds Marc Zegans, Cambridge's own poet, pushes us ever further into the dark and murky areas of our own sexual and primal natures. Guided by his verbal flashlight, the nooks and crannies of loss, regret, desire, and memory are set in the gallery for viewing. 

On "Night Work", the blend of nocturnal growls and light-hearted mornings come through in his vocals made emotive by the language, Zegans weaves these sensory photographs with authentic passion, his voice yearning to touch another being. This is poetic intercourse and "Night Work" is the aphrodisiac. 

"I ere in favor of this long moment/knowing I have broken it forever."
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Her darling light quiet now, receding/ too dim for shadow; her open
eyes/ unpuddled by grief, light on nothing/ as her dust flicked
lashes/ untwitched, wait ready/ Is this poise, or something less?

"Laundry and Grief". This is classic Zegans. Immediate sensory
images, dangerous yet alluring eroticism, truthful, and sadly, often
regrettable intuition into the hearts and consciousness of others. As
his cd, “Night Work”, unfolds Marc Zegans, Cambridge's own poet,
pushes us ever further into the dark and murky areas of our own
sexual and primal natures. Guided by his verbal flashlight, the nooks
and crannies of loss, regret, desire, and memory are set in the
gallery for viewing.

On "Night Work", the blend of nocturnal growls and light-hearted
mornings come through in his vocals made emotive by the language,
Zegans weaves these sensory photographs with authentic passion, his
voice yearning to touch another being. This is poetic intercourse and
"Night Work" is the aphrodisiac.

"I ere in favor of this long moment/knowing I have broken it forever."
                            Read more...
                        

                            
We all have those songs—the ones that make us feel so deeply that whenever we hear them, wherever we may be, we’ll listen with our whole being and not just remember a feeling, but have that feeling again and then again. The mix of voice, lyric and sound keeps us captive in shared emotion.

There are some poems in Marc Zegans’ Night Work that hold me that way. His voice-- a bold, honeyed, nuanced instrument creates the music of these poems. The lyrics speak of longing, often sex, sometimes love and nearly always an ache for connection. To the girl with “tea brown hands” in Dounia. To the world his broken eyes won’t let him see in Withdrawal.  For all of the darkness conveyed, the illumination comes through the poet’s insight into these worlds. Whether you find them familiar or foreign, they are always vivid and rife with feeling. This CD is just gorgeous.
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Every artist, writer, and painter longs to find another person in their lifetime to which they can say, “you really get me, who I am and what I have been through.”  We long for a connection with someone who can show us that our experiences in this life are valid not a creation of what often we are told is our memory twisted to suit our own view of the world. We hope that somewhere there is another human being on the planet that can describe for us our experiences of life: our loves and losses, our joys and our trauma.  Why else, if not to find pieces of our fractured souls among the lives of others, would we seek to find ourselves in art, to read stories and poems, or lose ourselves in a good book? This search came to a conclusion for me when I discovered the poetry of American Performance Poet, Marc Zegans: poems that at times impact like a fist, at times like a lover, at times like a mirror. 

There are 25 poems on Zegans recent live CD rich and resonant with vivid images skilfully spoken in a way that makes those images dive deep and take hold.  Though Zegans gives us countless things to ponder and feel, he winds a thread of images that focus’ on the eyes, vivid descriptions through vision, light and dark which takes the listener, almost harnessed, place to place showing past, present and future.  Hand in hand we travel with the same emotional attachment and detachment as the poet, responsibility and survival: controlled and disciplined.  We look, we feel, we experience, and, finally, we are validated by events.
 
Several poems stand out for me as particular gems. In “Clouding” the female’s eyes are “turbulent as milk”.  She is totally creepy—evil has taken up residence in her “quivering copper irises”, yet the poet feels at fault. 

The repeated lines in “Solstice” have a songlike quality. Like a chorus in a Tom Waits song we journey around a renovated haunt of Zegans’ youth: “I washed back twenty years” the chorus repeats until our tour of the bar ends with a sweet and sour lime twist when Zegans discloses that he and the bar “had changed places” and he had become the trusted old place of his youth: pure!

“Bastard’s Song’s” lines tumble double entendres into tags and da capos. “Illegitimate I in wedlock born” articulates, alliterates and legitimizes the common misconception of accidental pregnancy and birth and questions how the life of a child born and living could be of no consequence.

Promise and Lie: Images of light and reflection, metal and monster, violence and acceptance that in the end, with a body broken or spirit beaten and bruised, cracked and exposed like mosaic tile still has value and worth in the world if only to eventually tell the truth.

In “Puddle” we stand at the edge of Walden Pond, alone in a beautiful empty and quiet moment longing for wider spaces and feel what Robert Frost may have felt in “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Eve”. With a similar emotive sense to the poems of Leonard Cohen we are voyeurs having a luxurious sexual experience with “Night”, “Fall River Girl”, and “Dounia”, and we are shaken by images in “Trip” of death, dying and darkness as though we were standing at the side of a dying man’s bed as he repeats “I died three deaths last night”. 
		
Zegans’ work shows that all experience is worthwhile: that there is a purpose to the pain, grief, sorrow, joy and longing.  In the end we are left knowing that love indeed exists and that we can do more than survive.   We may be damaged, but we are still standing, standing true—choosing to live fully, to love fully, even as we find ourselves fractured, broken, and beset by periods of despair.  Walking hand in hand with the author, we look at the bits and pieces of our broken lives and find that in the journey we have come to embrace our true selves.

~  Donna Creighton
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