In this new chapbook, Anderson veers away from his usual narratives & portraits. The poetry here is more abstract. It includes many found and cut & paste poems, sometimes influenced by his students. The front cover is beautifully illustrated by the Swedish writer and artist Henry Denander.
Find Jason Gerrish’s recent interview about the chap here:
https://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/2022/01/jason-garish-interviews-george-douglas.html
A couple of blurbs about the chapbook:
The Factory of Eccentric Poetics
George Douglas Anderson
Poets, are mostly cowardly, that is, once a poet hits on a form/style to comfortably put their words across, they dig a hole and jump into it: (myself included) it feels safe and secure.
George Douglas Anderson digs tunnels and you never know where the tunnels will be taking you, until you are there: as a Small Press Publisher, when I request and receive a manuscript from George, I know one thing for certain, it will be quality: ‘The Factory of Eccentric Poetics’ is exactly that: from the hazy, ghostly cover art work from the ever brilliant Henry Denander, depicting a trumpet playing jazz musician, drowning in a flush and array of uplifting colours, to the final poem, ‘The Thing Itself’, the reader is easily, smoothly locked into the rhythm of the book, as the poems lunge and plunge like the soulful breath of Chet Baker or glide silk-like, like a haunting Miles Davis solo: the time signatures roam freely, without hesitation: passion and compassion drives this book: ‘The Parched Grass’ ‘Danger Falling Man’ ‘His Brain is a Fish’ ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ ‘Skinned’ to name a few, are simply, strangely enchanting and captivating.
Dig ‘The Factory of Eccentric Poetics’: dig the works of George Douglas Anderson:
John D Robinson
Poet and Publisher.
The Factory Of Eccentric Poeticsis the latest chapbook by author George Douglas Anderson. In this collection of eighteen new and abstract poems, Anderson explores a new poetic voice, veering from the authorial and objective narrative style he established in earlier chaps and in his full-length book of poems: The Rough End Of The Pineapple.In his own words, Anderson says,“The chapbook is an attempt to affirm but also to subvert post-modern ways of thinking…”.
The poem A Bee Collecting Honey is a sequence of engaging images, which defy a linear interpretation. It is the first poem in the collection that had me consider: Can a poem be a collage?
Anderson says, of A Bee Collecting Honey,“The chronology of the poem’s narrative is deliberately thrown into disarray and instead is revealed in fragments. It uses compressed images and associations to reveal a woman’s tormented life which has been tragically cut short.”
Several poems in this collection read like a collage; and if a poem can be described as a crazy quilt, it is Anderson’s poem Skinned, which he says of the title, “…refers to a recent trend to cut out the full back tattoo panels of heavily tattooed corpses and to preserve them as Art.”
The images in this piece engage me so successfully, I become hell bent on interpreting them collectively, but Skinned defies a linear interpretation. I feel the poem calls for an escape from the material world, for a spiritual release. Anderson says of the poem“…I perhaps imagined the words, like the deceased’s tattooed skin expressing a montage of feelings and experiences.”
The risks Anderson takes cutting from usual narrative style, make The Factory Of Eccentric Poetics a rewarding read. They are a postmodern patchwork that reveal a diversity of spirit and a troubled world of tortured souls.
Jason Garish
Limited edition: 25 signed and numbered. Only 5 left to dispatch.
Buy the book here direct through PayPal: georgedanderson8@gmail.com for $5 AUD plus postage.
Postage: Australia wide: $2.20
USA / Europe: $14.60 (I'll throw in another chap)
