Michael McAloran's Final Fragments (Book Review) by David McLean

This is what it says, it is poetry as it expresses the last things one can say about the void, it is what a suicide can say before actually dying. “I am too patient, with my own death” says the protagonist. Aren't we all?

The book depicts the love of death, the “will to desist” as it grows and burgeons within the voice of the poems. It is, As Connie Stadler says on the cover, full of the heritage of Beckett and that existential tradition.

He shows the splendor that there is “to be had” in the world as a real possibility, but frivolous, just another chunk of nothing, and wants to join the darkness and its “earthen caress.”

Ultimately we all, in our fascination with death, approach it “as an idiot child approaches a silent clear infinite lake, yet without wonder” because there is no locus called “death” where we will “be.” There “is” no void. What is fascinating with death, however, as McAloran shows, is the alternative to saying no to life, this “tomb of idiocy.”

This book also touches the dark pleasures of the death-madness, “my heart vibrates...I piss upon love as if I were scratching at a festering wound..I find joy in the obscene..There is laughter, also, at the heart of the stricken void”

The book depicts a memory of a love and its abandonment, the memory of the woman seeming to become a corpse on a bed, because memories are corpses, ultimately, no use to us.

This is a very short review and the fragments are short, it's a fragmentary review of a book of fragments, and in it Michael McAloran becomes “the closed fist of the night” - a fist of poems ready to punch away some illusions from the reader's complacent face.

Get the book from here: Calliope Nerve Media. Or directly, here: Lulu.

Author bio:

David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there on an island in a large lake called Mälaren, very near to Stockholm, with woman, cats, and a couple of large black and tan dogs. He is an atheist, an anarchist and generally disgusting. He has a BA in History from Balliol, Oxford, and an MA in philosophy, taken much later and much more seriously studied for, from Stockholm. Up to date details of well over a thousand poems in various zines - both print and online, both degenerate and reputable - over the last three years or so are at his blog at Mourning Abortion. There you will also find details of several currently available books and chapbooks - including three print full lengths, four print chapbooks, and a free electronic chapbook.