Dark Energies

By Ann K. Schwader, Robert M. Price, S.T. Joshi

2015

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

112

Number of Pages

3H24M

Audio Length

Schwader's latest collection! Dark Energies released! Dark Energies is the powerful latest collection by American poet, Ann K. Schwader. New and hard-to-procure collected poems expand the vista of her artistic vision. They explore human plight in a dark cosmos and pitch historical, contemporary and futuristic observations in spellbinding metrical forms. As with all memorable poetry, this collection creates a thirst for more of her work. Inspired by writers as diverse and distant in time as Homer, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Schwader carves a formidable place in the imaginative literary tradition. She is a much-valued contemporary of Marge Simon, Bruce Boston, Richard L. Tierney, Leigh Blackmore, Kyla Lee Ward, Robert M. Price and S. T. Joshi. Titles such as "Fatal Constellations," "Medusa, Becoming," "Frost Ghosts," "Set Comes to Whitechapel," and "Desert Nocturne," give a hint of the powerful imaginings swirling through Dark Energies and lend themselves to fancies of other times and spaces. The essence of Dark Energies is conceived through the persistent challenge of cosmic darkness and the rare piercing light in that darkness. It burgeons with imagination, meaning and existence, and poses perennial, eternal questions. In Dark Energies we plummet through abysses of sensation and riotous imagination, as when "we sheathe / our minds in lilac-sweet despair" ("Frost Ghosts"), or see "In autumn, the leaves grow heavy with omens / cryptic & golden" ("Wind Shift"). Historical poems, such as "Night Laundry" set in London, 1843, and "Necropolis Railway Incident" set in contemporary London but laced with memories of the Blitz in World War II, provoke remarkable and dire associations of time and fateful human experience. Schwader's work links modern and traditional poetry forms. She employs the English sonnet, the French sestina, the Japanese haibun (haiku-like fragments) and other poetry forms with masterly skill. Her skilled literary characterization builds on mythological, historical and Lovecraftian Mythos personalities and she creates original fictional characters of resilience, integrity and vitality, including female protagonists who transcend "heroine" and "victim" stereotypes. Above all, there is a steady beat of realism in her work, exuded through calm and reflective language, reminiscent of Coleridge's observation on the suspension of disbelief in literature. The realism and calmness of Schwader's expression allows the reader to absorb the cryptic cosmic messages that underlie her work. By turns Lovecraftian, archaeological, historical, contemporary, and futuristic, her poetry fulfils S. T. Joshi's perspective that "her imaginative palette is remarkably wide." Fantasy and imagination vie with responsibility and reality to deliver a work of absorbing resonance and outstanding quality. Schwader is a most talented, award-winning poet (SFPA Rhysling; Bram Stoker Award finalist). This is her seventh poetry collection, and her first book published in Australia. Issued in hardcover ISBN 978-0-9943901-0-3, and paperback ISBN 978-0-9804625-1-7.

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Authors

Sunand Tryambak Joshi is an Indian American literary scholar, and a leading figure in the study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors. Besides what some critics consider to be the definitive biography of Lovecraft (H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, 1996), Joshi has written about Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, Lord Dunsany, and M.R. James, and has edited collections of their works. His literary criticism is notable for its emphases upon readability and the dominant worldviews of the authors in question; his The Weird Tale looks at six acknowledged masters of horror and fantasy (namely Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Dunsany, M. R. James, Bierce and Lovecraft), and discusses their respective worldviews in depth and with authority. A follow-up volume, The Modern Weird Tale, examines the work of modern writers, including Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, T. E. D. Klein and others, from a similar philosophically oriented viewpoint. The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004) includes essays on Dennis Etchison, L. P. Hartley, Les Daniels, E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, L. P. Davies, Edward Lucas White, Rod Serling, Poppy Z. Brite and others. Joshi is the editor of the small-press literary journals Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, published by Necronomicon Press. He is also the editor of Lovecraft Annual and co-editor of Dead Reckonings, both small-press journals published by Hippocampus Press. In addition to literary criticism, Joshi has also edited books on atheism and social relations, including Documents of American Prejudice (1999), an annotated collection of American racist writings; In Her Place (2006), which collects written examples of prejudice against women; and Atheism: A Reader (2000), which collects atheistic writings by such people as Antony Flew, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, Gore Vidal and Carl Sagan, among others. An Agnostic Reader, collecting pieces by such writers as Isaac Asimov, John William Draper, Albert Einstein, Frederic Harrison, Thomas Henry Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Corliss Lamont, Arthur Schopenhauer and Edward Westermarck, was published in 2007. Joshi is also the author of God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003), an anti-religious polemic against various writers including C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley, Jr., William James, Stephen L. Carter, Annie Dillard, Reynolds Price, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Guenter Lewy, Neale Donald Walsch and Jerry Falwell, which is dedicated to theologian and fellow Lovecraft critic Robert M. Price. In 2006 he published The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong, which criticised the political writings of such commentators as William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, David and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving and William Kristol, arguing that, despite the efforts of right-wing polemicists, the values of the American people have become steadily more liberal over time. Joshi, who lives with his wife in Moravia, New York, has stated on his website that his most noteworthy achievements thus far have been his biography of Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life and The Weird Tale.