Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world
Push off and sitting well in order, smite the sounding furrows
For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of
All the Western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the happy isles
And see the great Achilles whom we know.
Though we are not now that strength we were,
That which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate
But strong in will to strive, to seek to find and not to yield.
These lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson represent the furthest extent of my poetic literacy. I memorised them as a wean, not because I had to for school, but because they were on the frontspiece of Alastair Maclean’s first novel, H.M.S. Ulysses. Maclean, long forgotten now, was a prolific author of “Boy’s Own” type fiction, like Wilbur Smith, my other all-time favourite author. Neither are Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters, but they are rather simple and puerile and meant for prepubescent boys of all ages, a description that fits me to a T. I read Tennyson not because I am intellectually curious. I read Tennyson because Alastair Maclean put him there. Strength of recommendation, although after all these centuries, I cannot be sure that I have all of the above citation right. Nevertheless, it is a rather simple poem written to cater to rather simple tastes like mine. The same goes for the A.E. Houseman poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” which I got to know and love simply because a section of it was beautifully written up as the end credits song of the unbelievably bad abortion that was the Hollywood botch-up of Fredrick Forsythe’s The Dogs of War.
This preamble was necessary to illustrate that I am poetically virtually illiterate, which means that my review below of Laval, Quebec, Canada teacher and poet's Mr. Mike’s beautiful book of poetry, Owl’s Moonlight, should not be construed as a serious literary analysis of the kind that a trained professional like Gore Vidal would have put out.
That being said, in a way,Owl’s Moonlight has a lot in common with the novels of Alastair Maclean and Wilbur Smith. That is not to say that Owl’s Moonlight was in any way inspired by these novels. For one thing, Mr. Mike is a young man, and Maclean and Smith were before his time. For another thing, Mr. Mike is an extremely mature young man who has had a harder life than most and who would have zero time for “Boy’s Own” puerile nonsense even if he had heard of the specific exemplars I cited. So, entirely independently of Maclean and Smith, Mr. Mike’s poetry thematically resembles a typical Maclean/Smith protagonist—or Royal Irish Regiment Captain Doug Beattie, MC,’s more recent “Adam Caine”— , which is to say someone in an impossible situation who finds a way out, the difference being that Maclean/Smith’s protagonists find themselves in outlandish difficult circumstances while Mr. Mike has lived through real-life difficult circumstances. However, the similarities in the overarching themes are too powerful to ignore.
Themes. Yes, I am good at noticing and writing about themes in the same way that I am puerile at best, and most likely illiterate in reality, when it comes to poetry. That is why I focus on the themes of Mr. Mike’s Owl’s Moonlight, rather than on the structure of its poetry. Asking me to give an informed opinion of the structure of a poem more complicated than those of Tennyson and Houseman is like asking “Georgie” from Young Sheldon to explain how CERN and JPL work. But, a brief, and extremely ill-informed, note on the form of Mr. Mike’s poetry.
There is a form and a meter to it. The use of punctuation and the selection of which words are capitalised, and which are not, are as central to the poems as are the diction and the content. The choices Mr. Mike made in what he does and does not punctuate and capitalise were deliberate.
So, themes. One overarching theme of Owl’s Moonlight is overcoming obstacles. This is a theme Owl’s Moonlight has in common with, not only the fictional protagonists of Alastair Maclean and Wilbur Smith, but also with the very real-life person of General George Washington. If one reads either Edward Lengel’s military biography of General Washington or Robert Middlekauf’s Washington’s Revolution, one sees a man who lost more battles than he won, with the battles he won owing more to contingent circumstances than to his brilliance. More importantly, however, one sees that General Washington, despite defeat after defeat after impending defeat, never gave up. This is a, if not the, central theme of Owl’s Moonlight.
A subtheme of this which recurs throughout the book is that of mountains and other heights. This subtheme is explicitly present in the poems “Devil’s Mountain Peak” (from the second section “Pain”), “Hyampeia” and “White Fog” (from the section “Isolation”) and “Echo” and “Eyes” (from the section “Love.”) In all of these poems, Mr. Mike either explicitly (by describing an difficult but unrelenting climb) or implicitly (by pointing out that one can see more from a higher vantage point) advocates making the effort to climb higher in order to better one’s self. From his Twitter, there is no evidence that Mr. Mike is a Soldier or Veteran or that he is otherwise particularly militarily cognizant. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that he is aware that his subtheme of climbing something to better one’s self reflects the New York-based 10th Mountain Division’s motto “Climb To Glory.” This is also clear in “Dying Wish” (from “Pain”), wherein Mr. Mike says to fill his path with Rosemary pedals. The specific diction of pedals is not a misprint or a Word autocorrect lapse. No, pedals, in this context is an active choice over petals, indicating that Mr. Mike wants a hard road that will make him stronger, as opposed to the easy path, something he more explicitly states in “Choice” (from the section “Pain.)
Likewise, from his Twitter, there is nothing to suggest that Mr. Mike has ever heard of Sven Hassel’s Legion Of The Damned series, or of Jean Lartéguy’s Les Centurions. Furthermore, Mr. Mike is a decent young man and not a bitter relic like yours truly, me being exactly the kind of scum that Hassel and Lartéguy catered to. As a result, the fact that there is an overlap between many of Mr. Mike’s themes of, not only survival against obstacles, but also of the unmitigated harshness of reality with those of Hassel and Lartéguy is entirely parthogenic on Mr. Mike’s part. In “Pain’s” “Clipped Wings” and in “Isolation’s” “Morning Corpses,” for example, Mr. Mike notes the wretched conditions in which modern humanity exists, as opposed to lives. This parallels Hassel’s description of all the hapless peasants he (or the ones who told him the stories, since there is a controversy as to whether or not Hassel actually served, or simply made novels second-hand out of what he was told by Danes who had actually returned from the Eastern Front) had come across while serving in what he called the 27 Strafepanzer (27th Penal Armoured) Regiment. This also parallels Lartéguy’s exploration of his Viet Minh antagonists’ former lives as Indochinese natives who had endured betrayal and mistreatment at the hands of the French Union Forces, of which his Colonial Para prisoner of war protagonists are the embodiment.
“Pain’s” “Musculoskeletal Pain,” “Running in the Rain,” “Kick to the Head,” and “Butter Toast,” as well as “Isolation’s” “Unheard,” Corporeal,” “Alone” and “Canadian Winter” all parthogenically parallel the eponymous first novel in Hassel’s Legion of the Damned series as well as the first section of Lartéguy’s Les Centurions. All of these poems recount an indescribably painful, hopelessly bleak and ostensibly insurmountable personal reality which Mr. Mike nevertheless fights to overcome. In the series-eponymous novel Legion of The Damned, Sven Hassel (or the real-life Danish soldier he cribbed the story from) is incarcerated in a concentration camp and fed starvation rations for having deserted the German Army, after which he is given the option of going back to the front in a Penal Regiment where death is almost guaranteed. In the first section of Les Centurions, a group of French officers, many of them paratroopers, are the prisoners of the victorious Viet Minh who try to break them and convert them to Bolshevism. Two of the officers, “Esclavier” and “Marindelle,” unsuccessfully attempt to escape. “Marindelle” is the more clever of the two. After he is captured, he organises his fellow POWs to give extremely convincing lip service to the Viet Minh’s attempts to brainwash them (for Mr. Mike, just erase “Viet Minh” and pencil in “concussion” and “isolation” and the rest is the same), while, at night, organising themselves to, not escape physically, but discuss and debunk the entirely bravo sierra nature of what the Viet Minh tried to feed them during the day. As a whole, Lartéguy’s characters have the exact same choice that Mr. Mike did in dealing with concussion and other hardships. They could just give in to their circumstances and die, like “Lacombe” does and like “Esclavier” nearly does, or they can figure out a way to survive despitetheir circumstances, like “Marindelle” does, and like Mr. Mike does in real life.
“Marindelle” constructs an alternative world to cope with the real one he and his fellow POWs cannot escape. At first glance, one might be inclined to believe that Mr. Mike does the same, given the themes of condemnation of social media, the inequities of society and the beauty of nature that run throughout Owl’s Moonlight. However, Mr. Mike does not at all advocate living in alternate, fantasy worlds as answers to horrible situations. On the contrary, he advocates engaging with the real world. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the stark contrast between “Isolation’s” immediately proximate, snout-to-hindquarters, “Morning Corpses” and “Station.” The first one, as I mentioned, notes the pitiful state of people in modern society. The second exhorts these people to escape by engaging with what bread crumbs modern society unwittingly leaves for us.
In this, and many other, senses, Mr. Mike is entirely a realist. He is not a Minniver Cheevyesque romantic praising a past that never was and holding up that entirely mythical past as an answer. Mr. Mike’s realism in this regard is an immense blessing, far more than many can understand. Minniver Cheevy is an amusement because he is fiction. The problem is that, in recent history, extremists have used the theme of a lost, paradisical past as a reason to go out and kill those who do not fit into that past that never was. Quebec’s anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, proto-CAQiste Lionel Groulx is one example, who, thankfully, lacked the infrastructure and organisational skills of his more successfully murderous contemporaries, SS Gruppenführer Walter Richard Darré and Cornelieu Zelea Codreanu. Groulx, Darré and Codreanu not only promoted an entirely false idea of a perfect past, they also advocated (and in Darré and Codreanu`s cases, succeeded in) the mass murder of anyone who did not fit into that mythological past. That Mr. Mike, in “Isolation’s” “Station” and “Elsewhere,” and in “Pain’s” “What is Peace?” advocates working within the current reality to improve it, as opposed to annihilating society because it is imperfect, is a message that cannot be repeated often or loudly enough.
“Elsewhere,” “What is Peace,” and “Isolation’s” “Service Clerk all merit specific mention because they all, either explicitly or implicitly, advocate working with what we have. “Service Clerk” starts out as a description of Bob Cratchettesque drudgery, but then ends with the mention of a silver pen. This suggests that, even in the lows of darkness, there is something bright and hopeful to be found. Like “Elsewhere” and “What is Peace?”, it is reminiscent of the Cuba scene in the filim The Fate of the Furious, wherein Vin Diesel’s character, challenged to a street race, has only a less than optimal car to race with. Does Diesel’s character forfeit the race? Hell no! Rather, Diesel’s character removes from the substandard car what is superfluous and modifies those parts of it he needs in order to be competitive in the race. That is what “Elsewhere, “What Is Peace?” and “Service Clerk” are all about. Likewise, these poems are reminiscent of the Royal Norwegian Air Force’s combat against Germany’s Luftwaffe in 1940. The Germans had modern, twin-engined Bf-110’s and JU-88’s. The Royal Norwegian Air Force had antiquated Gloster Gladiator biplanes. Yet, these antiquated Norwegian biplanes shot down two of the Luftwaffe’s modern (for the epoch) planes. This theme of use what you have, let nothing go to waste is also evident in “Isolation’s” “Alone” and “Canadian Winter.” “Alone” speaks of being wrapped in strips of aluminium foil. This could imply fear of being cooked and eaten. However, more consistently with the overarching theme of survival, aluminium reflects body heat, which is why survival blankets are made of aluminium. Likewise “Canadian Winter” speaks of “beaten hide.” This could imply that the author is beaten and is now hiding to recuperate. However, more consistently with the overarching theme, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Native Americans used the beaten hides of the Buffalo to make blankets to protect them from the cold.
One special note on “What is Peace?” It says that living humbly and content has an underlying truth to it, implying that, pace Housewives of [insert name of city here], one does not need the extravagant Beverley Hills lifestyle to be happy. This parthogenically parallels Australian Army Captain (and Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran) James Brown’s ANZAC’s Long Shadow, wherein Captain Brown decries the Gallipoli myth for creating unrealistic expectations of today’s soldiers, for who “a quiet day without an incident is a good day.”
“Elsewhere,” “What is Peace” and “Service Clerk,” as well as “Pain’s” “First Mistake,” and “Love’s” “Brain Freeze” are all also poetic iterations of what aviators call stall recovery. Long story short, flying an aeroplane under normal conditions is one thing. Recovering from a stall (i.e., nose too high=no wind under the wings=losing lift rapidly=crash is IMMINENT unless you go through the stall recovery procedures thoroughly and rapidly) is quite another thing entirely. Stall recovery, like Owl’s Moonlight as a whole, has nothing to do with smooth sailing. It has to do with an extremely anomalous circumstance, and then recovering from it, whatever the attendant difficulties may be. “Brain Freeze,” although seemingly banal, fits right into this. It says that rejection is like the brain freeze one gets from eating ice cream. The implication is that the discomfort of brain freeze is only temporary and entirely survivable if one keeps one’s head and stays the course. These poems, as well as Owl’s Moonlight as a whole, are an exceptionally polite parthogenic expression of the sentiment of the chorus of July Talk’s “Paper Girl,” which goes “If you want money in your coffee, if you want secrets in your tea, keep your paper heart away from me.”
“Pain’s” “Golden Support” is similar in this regard. This poem essentially notes that, when one is strong, others ceaselessly plead for one’s support, as if one was not a human with limits. This immediately made me think of Kylie Ireland’s ordeal making The 8th Day, wherein Kylie, as production designer, was put in an impossible position of making a million dollar-looking feature on a thousand dollar budget. Kylieopenly described the agony this brought on her, but she reiterated that her motto throughout the ordeal that was the production of The 8th Day was “The only way out is through!” That is a theme that recurs throughout Owl’s Moonlight.
It would be a mistake, however, to say that Owl’s Moonlight is merely a Mickey Spillane-style hardnosed volume on how to live in the real world and get away with it. There is a passionate love of beauty, of learning, a persistent curiosity and inquisitiveness throughout the book. “Isolation’s” “The Holy City of Shades,” and “Love’s” “Good Morning” and “Strange Moonlight” all extol light. For one thing, Mr. Mike has sustained concussions, and people who have sustained concussions can feel extremely uncomfortable in the presence of light. For another, “Light” is a classic literary theme, one that has been around since the epoch of the Christian Bible. Light as a theme endured when the Age of Faith gave way to the Enlightenment and Reason, and Goethe’s last words were a plea for more light. Light represents knowledge, and those who seek the light seek to know more than they currently do, they seek to improve themselves. This is explicitly stated in “Love’s” “Christmas Lights” and “Heaven’s Walls.” In the former, Mr. Mike wonders whether Christmas lights, if they could speak, would be archetypes of traditions or departures from tradition. In the latter, Mr. Mike speaks very clearly of looking past dirty windows to see the beauty of nature outside. This is implicit in “Love’s” “Moonlight Distance” and “Strange Moonlight.” Moonlight is less illuminative than sunlight, which is why the military equips its troops with thermals and Night Vision Goggles. That Mr.Mikespecifically seeks out the moonlight to try to learn things suggests that he is strongly inclined to learn all he can about the beauty of this world, to look for it in places where most of us would have given up looking because they are not so easy to discern. This is consistent with the theme of the Owl, a bird of the night whose eyes are specially adapted to see at night, unlike the more beauteous birds of the day who, for all their beautiful plumage, can only see what everyone else can see by going along with the crowd.
Now, as I have consistently done whenever I reviewed something in this space, and because I was a peripheral participant in #GamerGate, the fight against video game journalists who gave five star ratings to game developers who were their buddies in real life, while trashing anything that did not fit their agenda, I have to find something in Owl’s Moonlight to criticise for the sake of not committing hagiography. For me, the mention of “Kharkiv” chilled me. There is no evidence that this is a deliberate political statement on the part of Mr. Mike. It is just that, as a reader of Esprit de Corps, I remember Scott Raymond Taylor’s articleson current UkrainianNazis, which is why the mention of “Kharkiv,” instead of the more commonly used Kharkov, left me uneasy, albeit just for a moment.
That minor detail aside, Owl’s Moonlight is a beautiful book of poetry that is a much needed tonic for all during these times. It is like the song that we supporters of the Famous Glasgow Rangers sing, “Every Saturday, We Follow,” most specifically the lines “Though times, they have been hard/We follow near and far!” sung beautifully by Damien Hendry and Jodie Pollock. It also resembles the lyric “Through the good and the bad, we've come through them both” from Ms. Pollock’s more recent song "I'll Follow Rangers."
It is available in Canada at: Owl’s Moonlight
It is available in America at: Owl's Moonlight
It is available in Britain at: Owl's Moonlight