Canadian Poetry; Wet Ink Books; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.WetInkBooks.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef
 

 

John Tyndall

 

 
Canadian Poetry; Hidden Brook Press; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.hiddenbrookpress.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef
 

 

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Review of John Tyndall’s Mangoes from the Seventh Dimension

                I have been a fan of John Tyndall’s poetry for forty years; his finely crafted and highly original poems are perfect crystals, beautifully shaped and worded, filled with images that are visual and sensory, inviting the reader, or the listener, to see, hear, and feel the many elements of John’s world.  His poem “SPECTACLES” is an excellent example of the way that John sees the world, with spectacles that are always new, that always see that kingfisher that “plunges / disappears.”  John writes that

“clutching a silver fish / it flaps to farther shore / where I can make out / the wriggling tale-fin / going down and gone.”

             

John “sees,” translates, keeping alive such fleeting images in his poems, as he attempts to restore or re-create what is lost,  “create to keep now forever / when every Pharaoh, everyone / will become as mummy dust / and even the pyramids / over time will be levelled / and gone” (“To Keep Now Still”). 

John reaches back to Egypt and other ancient places, to myths and histories, transforming what he sees through his magical spectacles.  He describes both the exotic and the ordinary – but nothing is ordinary or mundane in John’s vision.  A waiter becomes the cupbearer of Alexander the Great.  Supermarket mangoes come from the seventh dimension.  The magical is never far away: the goddess Danu enchants; George Harrison offers the speaker a ride “out of suburbia”; even something as mundane as a haircut and shave becomes a secret journey to transformation. Three items left on a bench lead John to imagine a dramatic scene, only to see it differently on his second viewing (“Installation”).  The mind, the poem, creates and re-creates.  

In John’s poems works of art, artefacts in museums, all become immediate, personal, present, alive.   In the poem “Silverpoint,” dedicated to the artist Richard A. Kirk,  John demonstrates and describes the artistic process: “every curve and arabesque / so surreal, so perfectly / argentine, line by line / you pluck from desire / shaded bird bones / sternum, wing and skull / grinding them down / for a grounding.”  

Blended in his poems are his love of the Beatles, of Kate Bush, of mythology, of birds, of all kinds of art.  In his final poem of this collection, “Word Temple,” he visualizes, even in the shape of the poem, the building of a temple,  the creation of a poem, where the writer and reader, the teller and listener, the chant and the chanter, the priest and the acolyte, exchange places, or are one person, or are always in a wonderful dance together.   Thus, in words so sensuous, with sounds so evocative of that combination of dreamy fantasy and the surprising world around him, John Tyndall brings us into his poetry, so that we may appreciate the magical along with him.

                                                                                               

Reviewed by

Marianne Micros

 

 
Canadian Poetry; Wet Ink Books; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.WetInkBooks.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef