A new book from the poet who has previously published 10 books of poetry, the first in 1972.
Excerpt
I do not hope to turn
To see the ageing moon,
Our lives are measured finally
By the twist of a coffee spoon.
Professional Reviews
New poetry
Stephen Morris has produced 12 volumes of poetry over a long writing career which has run parellel and frequently overlapped with his work as a visual artist. LIMBUS OF THE MOON is his thirteenth book and in some ways is outstanding. It serves as a fine introduction to his poetry although his visual poems are not represented, and these are among his strongest work, there is still much here to recommend it. In DANGEROUS DAYS Morris tells us "some days/are more dangerous/than others/the postman brings bad news". He takes us through a litany of things to illustrate this contention including children crying and a dog howling, the news of death before bringing it to an intensly personal conclusion with "she hasn't phoned/the bitch just hasn't phoned" The title poem concludes with the lines "Nothing prevails in death/The final perfect art". This is a repeated theme as there are poems about death, about lost love. The sense of loss is palpable and explored well.
Life and Death
This book was put together after a life threatening illness and not only would Stephen Morris be the first to say it shows, but he was the first to say it. There are poems on the death of Jeff Nuttall, for the late Roy Robinson, on growing old and the end of relationships - but there is a nice chatty ironic quality to one of the 'break-up' poems, FOR SURE.
"In the shadow/lies the past/the tunnel is at the end of the light" is the old school Morris word play. There is also a return to form that he employed years ago, playing with words and incorporating jokey punch lines. The publication LIMBUS OF THE MOON feels like a homage to his earlier books from Aquila, somehow echoed in the forms he is revisiting.
Limbus reviewed
For most of his life Stephen Morris has been a revolutionary, an iconoclast, peace campaigner and lover of woman. Much older now, he shows signs of accepting the world as is-resigned, like the rest of us, to the fact that he is "owned by time". The quotation comes from the latest volume of his poetry.
On the Stephen Morris web site there is an early idealised but accurate comic-strip style portrait of the poet as a 34 year old rebel, with a shock of black hair, a clowns nose and a stare of feirce, almost frightening intensity. Nowadays long flowing locks of grey hair and a full greying beard combined with the same intense eyes to give Morris a Zeus-like appearance, and it is with the authority of a Zeus -sans thunderbolts- that he puts a metaphysical slant on mortality in his recent book 'LIMBUS OF THE MOON'. Although the subject matter of each poem is fairly prosiac, collectively they convey the existence of an indefinable something or other outside the physical world and the imminent or actual tragedies of the people in them. On the page the death of a friend signifies no more than "one less Christmas card to send" but between the lines of death he ascends into the devine nothingness of the universe.
In fact, on their face value, most of the poems resemble snippits of autobiography, relating to misfortunes of a survivor in short lines that are poised, stoical, desolate. No melodrama: just "zero years", "black holes" despair and limbo.
The mood changes for 'THINGAMAJIGS' a recital of charming reduplications like pitter-patter, slap-dash, riff-raff, shilly-shally, hanky-panky' arranged into a sound poem.
Then we visit the metaphysical of emptiness 'LESS', the permanence of grief 'IT LURKS IT HURTS' and the arching bodies 'THE WORD IS OUT', with its key line "We are owned by time" before touring the author's conquests in love, who he sees like Picasso, as either goddesses or doormats. (The illustrations though feature rather more wood nymphs than doormats).
The remaining piece take us back to death and oblivion. But the title poem 'LIMBUS OF THE MOON', and the overall mood remind us that the given starkest tragedies in our lives with the silent mysticism of the universe.
NOW AVAILABLE!
This book is a limited edition, and copies are hand numbered. It will NOT be available through Amazon or other distributors. You must purchase it directly from the author or from this site. It is hard-back (not the spiral bind seen
In the Whirlwind is a poetic storm that frees history from the cages of corruption and puts it in the hands of everyday people. Words are weaved into a new fashion statement that has nothing to do with runways but everything to do with projects!
