Retro Book Review: BARRY EDGAR PILCHER

 

POEMS GROWN

 

IN BISCUIT CRUMBS

 

BESIDE THE RADIATOR

 

Retro Book Review of:
‘VASE OF 
A THOUSAND CRANES’
by 
BARRY EDGAR PILCHER
(Originally from Speed Limit Publications)

Barry plays ambidextrous clarinet stuffed with flowers. He’s been known to grow additional limbs for greater aural dexterity and sound manipulation that flows across pearlescent seas of skin. Birthed in 1943, a commercial artist for a half-decayed, Fire Watcher, member of the London Zen Buddhist community beneath thunderous peach clouds, he’s known to quote Balinese dictums in forests of aphorisms. He was a year at Detroit Motor-town artist’s workshop (hone of ‘golden fiery vaporous sky rockets’). And he writes poetry that infiltrates like autumn rain, like blown leaves, like paint spattered by Abstract Expressionists – thoughts floating in the void, haiku serene and transcendental, with a laugh of profound Dharma absurdity. Poems clustered like dust in a bohemian bedroom stacked with magic mandalas and mystic caballistic texts and hexes – poems of rolling madness like exotic narcotic plants of luxuriantly lush vegetation with tight tight tight buds (pregnant with hallucinatory dreams) grown in biscuit crumbs beside the radiator, wild wiry and wanton as uncombed hair, wet gleaming and salivating as a perfect Reichtian fuck that melts all sensual sensation into the white energy-dance webs of eternity. Check out the dual anthology ‘Magic City’ with Barry’s poems set against Mark Williams euphorically free-wheeling commentary on the Cardiff scene in general and the Pilcher’s pad in particular, while the poems in this booklet, like a day spent in the country, are as long as it takes to get there – and as worth the effort.