This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.

—John Keats

It is such an honor for me to announce today, on John Keats’s birthday, as well as the true beginning of that most wondrous “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and Samhuinn fires, that my very first collection of poetry, A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (2021), is now available for pre-order from Gothic Keats Press.  Although I try my pen on various genres and subjects, including fiction, travel narrative and memoir, biographical essays, and literary nonfiction, this book of poems is by far my most important publication, and, without a shadow of a doubt, the nearest and dearest to my heart.  It is no surprise then, especially on the bicentennial year of Keats’s tragic death at the age of 25 in 1821, that I have dedicated this book to his memory.

A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems has been years in the making, almost published twice during the “plague year” of 2020, and has brought me near to madness on several occasions.  I am pleased to write that my poems have been hauntingly and meticulously illustrated by Eli John, samples of which I will post below, and is available in both hardcover and electronic formats.  You can find information on the publisher’s website and on Amazon:

Hardcover — https://www.gothickeatspress.com/books

Kindle — https://www.amazon.com/Ride-Through-Faerie-Other-Poems-ebook/dp/B09KNW3ZQG

Below is only a small taste of what you will find inside:

She then revealed herself to me:
The Veiled One, between Life & Death,
Yet She is immortal, deathless,
Rider of storms, the wolf-charmer,
Goddess of frosts & lengthening darkness

She peeled off Her silver-spun flesh
Of cloud-lightning, spellbound by light
Alive with eyes of liminal skies,
And, intoxicated by eternity,
I beheld two worlds of one dark reality

—from “The Fires of Ecstasy at Samhuinn”

My sleep-dissolved eyes awakened
Amidst gilt-bronze curiosities,
Objet de vertu, Louis XV
Rocaille & antique Florentine,
Haughty portraiture from the House
Of The Young Chevalier, Bonnie Charlie,
Fire-singed fragments of Alfieri
And unfinished oil-originals
Of the fair-eyed & unrevenged
Daughter of the incestuous-sick Cenci

But in this room of rich opulence
Hid the design of her sick secrets:
Skin-stitched rotting dolls, oddly posed,
Decaying mannequins with dead faces…

—from “Edinburgh Ecstasies”

Then, from a passing shadow of night-mist,
Glistening wet like vitreous black opal,
Fleeting by upon a floating ghost-cloud
Carrying each color of pestilence,
There came a change: within the imprisoned
Beam of moonlight, and around those ghastly,
Still-watching eyes, there appeared a strange face,
Yet familiar as it took shape in the mists,
As if gazing into polished moon-glass
And finding the gaze of my own self-eclipse

—from “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey”

And though vividly delicious
On Victorian-papered walls
—Patterns of bats –spectral-green–, skeleton-
Fingered wings, gossamer-wisped veins, sinewed
Demon flesh, diffused and twisted through miles
Of pale-purpling opium flowers—
It too can be used for painted smiles
And smoke-inspired eyeshadow dyes

Go on, my darling, smudge a little more
–Just a little more–
To conceal your cancered lips and sleep-deprived eyes.

—from “My Little Green Secret”

This collection contains early poems of mine, such as “My Little Green Secret” seen directly above, as well as my later travel poems of Gothic fantasy that include “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey”, literally written (mostly written) beneath a full moon at Whitby Abbey, “Edinburgh Ecstasies” which was conceived and written while drinking interesting gin concoctions at The Jolly Botanist in Edinburgh during a rather miserable winter, not to mention the inspired night-walks back to my apartment afterward which passed through the 19th-century architecture of Moray Place that I came to admire, and “The Fires of Ecstasy at Samhuinn” that I began writing on Keats’s birthday shortly after attending the Samhuinn Fire Festival atop Calton Hill in 2018.  Each poem holds a special memory for me, a unique spirit of experience and imagination, and I am pleased that each one of these poems has been illustrated brilliantly.

My Whitby Abbey poem, although inspired by Draculaen Gothic thought and tinctured with my usual dose of Romanticism, possesses the most heartbreak, regret, despair, and tragedy, and therefore has more meaning to me than I could possibly put into words.  Given the poem’s profound significance to me, I have requested three very particular and highly detailed illustrations to go with it, each representing a particular change within the piece.  Although there are several reasons for my despair at the time, much of the poem’s tragedy and heartbreak were because of my beloved dogs, Blue and Anna.  I wish to write no more on this subject other than stating that I asked Eli if he could incorporate actual photographs of my dogs into the final illustration.  He did it wonderfully well, and now my Blue and Anna are truly a part of this book.

Also included within this collection are several poems that I composed this year, including “Keats Stone” that I wrote on 23 February, the actual bicentennial of Keats’s death, “The Queen of the Night” which is a night-inspired piece of Wollstonecraftian influence, and “My Mélusine Illusion”, loosely based and inspired by a somewhat Coleridgean and Shelleyan sort of “illusion” that I glimpsed upon the enchanted waters of Asturias in 2018 when I lived in Spain.  This latter poem is a somewhat spiritual (double meaning here, per usual) retelling of Mélusine’s story, a story that has interested me for years, as well as other literary retellings such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s “The Fairy of the Fountains” and A.S. Byatt’s brilliant novel Possession which, perhaps surprising to some, is one of my favorite novels.  At 27 pages, “My Mélusine Illusion” is one of my longer poems, and there were several nights during its composition, especially in July when a few black drops were required to ease the sufferings of intensely painful neck spasms, that I perhaps “indulged [my] imagination” too much and came dangerously close to that near madness that I wrote of earlier…

Writing of this poetical sort of madness is no laughing matter, and I write about it neither in riddles nor as some delusional hyperbole.  From my own personal experience, if one devotes too much time to poetry and poetry alone, brooding too deeply upon one’s imagination within the mind’s shadow-haunted halls, walking alone with spirits in faerie realms unseen, then I believe, truly believe, that one can become dangerously susceptible to a literary sort of madness, a true mental illness, an obsession, an all-consuming idée fixe, varying in degree of so-called monomania based on one’s own personal disposition.  I have reread old books as of late, as I usually do around this time of year, or when I’m under enormous stress, and I found much truth in a particular paragraph about the poetic imagination in Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company:

“The Augustan fear of madness, so strong in Swift and Johnson, plays a considerable part in this opposition, which goes so far as to attack what Johnson calls ‘the dangerous prevalence of the imagination.’  Swift, in his later years, went mad; Johnson came dangerously close to it.  The poets of the age of sensibility—say 1740 through 1770—reacted against Pope and Johnson and sought to return to the intellectual and aesthetic daring of Milton, with results in their lives, at least, which bore out Johnson’s melancholy warnings.  Chatterton killed himself at seventeen; Cowper, Collins, Christopher Smart, and others spent years in asylums for the insane, as the Romantic poet John Clare was to do after them; while poets like Gray and Burns ended in deep melancholy or profound social alienation.  The spectre haunting these generations was the fear of psychic energy, and the conviction that death-in-life awaited any poet who indulged his imagination.”

Although I regret nothing as it pertains to the creation of this book of poems, particular poems especially, and the sacrifices I felt compelled to make with regard to my finances by “retiring from the world” of prosaic career mundanities and the petulant knavery of nameless suits, not to mention the genuine sacrifices I made to my own health choosing to pursue a mostly solitary life so I could “be alone with my thoughts when I may”, I must admit a sense of relief to move on to other literary projects and to take a break from my poetic passions that have consumed me for so long.  My manuscript has been going back and forth between the printer and myself, and reading and rereading the proof has caused me much anxiety, as well as getting the illustrations printed exactly how I like.  Crushing perfectionism is truly a disease and the stress of ceaseless edits has been almost unbearable.  I long for my book to be printed so that I may make my mind free for other pursuits and move on.  It’s as Keats said in February of 1818, “I am anxious to get Endymion printed that I may forget it and proceed”, and again just a couple of weeks later, “I wish it [his book] was all done, for I want to forget it and make my mind free for something new”.  I marked these passages when I read them in 2018, but now I understand them.

To end this longer-than-expected announcement on a more positive note, I wish to write out a passage from a letter that Keats wrote in October of 1818, which happened to be a truly significant month for me 200 years later in 2018.  Keats was writing about the “Genius of Poetry”, or poetic creativity, and ends with wonderful lines that pertain to braving the waters of “literary failurism” (my own phrase).  This passage has been an important one for me, especially in recent months while preparing my book for the printer, and I have included it in the book’s opening front matter just beneath Keats’s dedication page.

“The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself.That which is creative must create itself.In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”