Dan Wylie
LIGHT VERSE AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL by Gus Ferguson (David Philip, R29)
WITH a bit of selective quotation, you could even argue that Gus Ferguson is a serious poet:
Life is but a gift of time Spent in gathering evidence Against the summons for the crime Of wasting that inheritance.
Or, on an African fir tree: Each upturned branch will never know Or test, its destined weight of snow.
Or, almost maudlin Donne: If love is blind then, welcome night! It often depends on context, of course: this last quote, from Sonnet in Couplets, continues:
Her lover’s love remains emphatic – He’s mercifully astigmatic.
Those rhythms and that title bear witness to Ferguson’s joyous obsession with form and craft; he revels in the paradoxical freedoms and challenges of the sonnet, the triolet, the haiku, even prose parodies of journ- and ad-speak. Not to mention his inimitably slapdash drawings. And he does it with such unerring facility as to make the rest of us free-versers feel like shambling tramps.
He is best, probably, in the shorter forms, such as this deliciously quirky haiku:
By an ancient pond a frog sits upon a log waiting for Basho.
There are outrageous puns (“Amongst cannibals/ the phrase `battered wife’ assumes/ Another meaning”) and oriental paradoxes (“I know for sure one thing that’s true:/ The Universe is just a clue”). There seems to be no quirk of language he can’t turn on itself, as in lamenting the demise of an old computer: “Dos to Dos/ Ascii to Ascii.”
But he is serious, sharply observant, critical. Beneath irrepressible playfulness is a tone of terrible lament at humanity’s destructiveness. Everything he writes is a protest against our uncaring blindness and dulled stupidity.
Just buy this wonderful volume! It will keep you warm, giggly and thoughtful for as long as you own it.
Dan Wylie’s collection of poems, The Road Out, was published last month by Snailpress