The Great Wheel

Edward Lense has written a series of strong, personal poems on the metaphysical framework of a deck of Tarot cards, a device, with its fascinating ambiguity and resonance, that serves his purpose remarkably well. The Tarot concepts work as a kind of I Ching-like throw of the coins to stimulate meditations on the poet’s life that are both passionate and fully guided. Accompanying these poems are drawings by Bruce Robinson, which have a roughness that speaks to the underlying torment in the poems, related at times to a kind of theological undertow that seems present in both. The Great Wheel seems to be a force of destruction and death, running through this work’s conscious or unconscious voices, and challenging the reader to confront a fuller understanding of what it means to be alive. As the poet says here, “Another body stirs inside my body,/its slow pulse not the beat of my heart but the tides,/a cloud of blood suspended in water.”