datum 1-Sam is my friend... but he is also a widely respected, admired and published poet who has spent a lifetime beating back demons with words, moody hallucinations that only exist in the mind of the reader, the writer. The words, I mean.. of course the demons are real. So that's what we've got here, moody hallucinations. But grounded in finer reality than what you often see in his work.
"In Carolina Places" he writes of "the rusty water tap and the thirst" and "this old baseball cap slung sideways on the head"-- he brings a surprisingly fine awareness to matters that I didn't know he had ever explored. This is a poem about people I knew as a child, slaving in tobacco fields and Burlington Mills. Or, what's this? Something like a villanelle! "Uplift Sweet Soul and Learn To Take" a retelling of Elvis' Jailhouse Rock? Yes, as Sam would have it, the jail's "Four walls, a lovely gift! They cause the sweet soul to uplift!"
We find hints of Joy Division and Wm Faulkner in this heady brew of a stew, but again and again we hear the deep bottom truth of Sam Silva's work... the re-incarnation of William Blake, from out of Portugal would you believe? My favorite poem in this book is "Being a Beast and of the Dead" a song about the "paths that mark divinity" and the "dead, the dead beast! Spring was there!... but you murdered it! Here is autumn with it's animal ghost ascending in smoke to the heavens"...
Silly you who only thought Blake had been reborn in a Johnny Depp movie, NO! he lives in Fayetteville and smokes like a fiend and grows his beard and loves his mate, his dog and his writing and he writes his ass off... because he knows that someday he will be remembered for this, his madman's life work of tearing images out of his mind and carving them, not of marble but of a far slipperier medium, words. So if you like your poetry vivid and full of surprises, I hope you are ready for the Roller Coaster Ride known as Sam Silva's Selected Poems.