FINALIST - 2017 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, presented by Utica College A poetic examination of what’s waiting just beneath every day experience.
As the title suggests, the poems in R. S. Mason’s Nearer to Never paradoxically comprise a book of the unmanifest, a poetic examination of what’s waiting just beneath everyday experience. Recalling Blake, Baudelaire, and Eliot, Mason addresses the innately sacred, melding philosophy, aesthetics, and Buddhist precepts into a lyrical work that is truly modern and avant-garde.
Rendered in a straightforward lyrical style, the poems are oddly comprehensible, at times darkly humorous. The language is fresh, elemental, and ludic; the writing is clean, direct, and empowered. Some poems wrestle with the conclusion that life reduces itself to some mere, otherworldly absence; while others reveal the false prison of the ideal, either humanistically or religiously constructed.
The poems invite a reader’s most intimate aesthetic engagement, through the technique of radical doubt or, in the Buddhist tradition, “beginner’s mind”—whereby each poem unlocks. In his debut, Mason drives poetry beyond the well-worn schisms established in the previous century, successfullyshowing that the irreconcilable can cohere, and the inexpressible can, at the most, be sketched.
“Zip”
I will not ascend on an engine A bobble scope, a space-kit
Nor breathe pure oxygen As I rumble through the finite
‘What’s indestructible Is fragile’I would utter In my voice-box!
