Launcelot Schaubert's THE GREENWOOD POET
In an effort to support more alliterative poet, I've just added several reviews on Amazon for Launcelot Schaubert's The Greenwood Poet. Not SF or fantasy, but heavily Inklings-indebted. What I wrote is below.
The Greenwood Poet is an engaging book of verse. Thematically, it's connected by the Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and Schaubert uses this location as a launching pad for his poetry, much of it in an alliterative meter. This collection is clearly inspired partly by the Inklings with a bit of G. K. Chesterton thrown into the mix, but outside a few (non-intrusive) references to Ents and Narnia, these poems are remarkably NOT fantasy or science fiction.
Instead, the Inklings' spirituality and environmentalism is what inspires Schaubert most heavily, which is a refreshing change of pace. For anyone who knows the Inklings well, they’ll detect some resonances. For instance, when the poem "Hart and the Machine" rails against the so-called "heroic" work of creating the future (the scare quotes are Schaubert’s), I detected shades of Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. Also, knowing Lewis’s The Discarded Image is a good supplement for “Elegy for a Star.” Likewise, although phones weren't a thing during the Inklings' time, I suspect Schaubert's dismissal of them in his first poem, "Greenwood's Portcullis," which he believes take people OUT of a spiritual connection with nature, might have earned their sympathy.
One of my favorite poems in the collection is "Five Geese Engorging Themselves," which is told with a wonderfully deft alliterative poetics, but it also makes a solid point about the alleged “inconveniences” of the natural world. Plus I just enjoyed someone calling geese "Canadian Demons" (l. 8).
Overall I'd highly recommend.
The Greenwood Poet is an engaging book of verse. Thematically, it's connected by the Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and Schaubert uses this location as a launching pad for his poetry, much of it in an alliterative meter. This collection is clearly inspired partly by the Inklings with a bit of G. K. Chesterton thrown into the mix, but outside a few (non-intrusive) references to Ents and Narnia, these poems are remarkably NOT fantasy or science fiction.
Instead, the Inklings' spirituality and environmentalism is what inspires Schaubert most heavily, which is a refreshing change of pace. For anyone who knows the Inklings well, they’ll detect some resonances. For instance, when the poem "Hart and the Machine" rails against the so-called "heroic" work of creating the future (the scare quotes are Schaubert’s), I detected shades of Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. Also, knowing Lewis’s The Discarded Image is a good supplement for “Elegy for a Star.” Likewise, although phones weren't a thing during the Inklings' time, I suspect Schaubert's dismissal of them in his first poem, "Greenwood's Portcullis," which he believes take people OUT of a spiritual connection with nature, might have earned their sympathy.
One of my favorite poems in the collection is "Five Geese Engorging Themselves," which is told with a wonderfully deft alliterative poetics, but it also makes a solid point about the alleged “inconveniences” of the natural world. Plus I just enjoyed someone calling geese "Canadian Demons" (l. 8).
Overall I'd highly recommend.
Comments
Post a Comment