There is an amazing amount of range here, Celtic organ meets a father's blues in the night, reminising the innocence of childhood against the backdrop of moving from post modern times to the land of too much information. There is a poet who travels in the shoes of the Holy Goof, the ever open and questioning role of the wise Mystic fool, Nasrudin. This the Poet Phil Gounis, who shares his travels in his native land o where the Mississippi River Blues defined a culture. But not satisfied to just retell the St Louis Blues, Mr. Gounis call on the radio, God, and most of all, a sense of lost and forgotten decency and common sense to save us all. The Poet asks us to believe in something other than what we see on the immediate surface, and try something more obviouos, the gift of humanity. These Poems are filled with the meaning of what most people never even catch out the corner of their eye. The fractured family is here too, you can almost feel the oppression coming down with the weight of Secular Myths taking the place of hearth and home. These Poems are the Poems of a man who trudged home in the snow after work and dared to believe in what he made his own. These poems invert the cynicism of the day into jackals and return the Zaddik, the Righteous man to his rightful place. And armed with what? The romance and Renaissance of what we learned and believed of in childhood, that kind of mythic and magestic knowing. Everything the Poet Phil Gounis puts forth is something already seen, aleady known, but forgotten, buried beneath the a culture that no longer honors its original intention, which is and was to create greater and greater freedoms, to stand in the place relationship.
It is amazing to see Mr Gounis falling back into the word and the sound, never losing sight of the innocence born to Mystics and Poets. By the time you reach the poem Lubrication you are firmly in land charted by likes of The Velvet Underground and The Stooges. But this is a Midwestern angst -- redbrick, factories, industrial, gritty, and cold ice in the winter, but still gentle enought to believe in the simplest of gifts, our families, our close associations, and yes, even love, and the decline of love deconstructed. This is not the Poetry of New York or the West Coast, but they Poetry of working class Mississippi Blues, fired up on double shifts and caffein. You can hear references to old blues men, slide guitar, bar hopping, the subconscious, the soul inside out, prison, guards, and the urgent rendering of a man pushing himself through language and sound to the place where comes more alive, sloughing off the convenience of what the Sufis refer to as The Commanding Self. This poetry is like all Mystically oriented poetry, a reeded call for their fellow man to wake up.
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