A Book of poetry.
Review of Between Holocausts
In Duane Vorhees's introductory poem "A Mind Rewinds", from his latest work Between Holocausts, Vorhees captures something indescribable, when he writes:
My psyche is littered with living Its/ Disregarded superegos still whine/ Od and Ob hiss between young green vines/Bony hilltops strain to catch day’s first light/ their bloodguilt insufficiently contrite.
I found the book's neurodivergent style instructive, creative, intuitive, alarming and haunting....as it grapples with a subject matter such as the holocaust with a sort of classic poetic indirectness that reads like a literary puzzle with a cartage of sometimes obscure literary symbolisms and references that compels further investigation.
The repetitious nature of the poems make for a particularly eerie experience, like an ominous cautionary tale being emanated from the sagacious tongue of someone GRAND...whether grandfather or grandmother, you want to lean forward in attention and anticipation. The author achieves preternatural phenomena in the way that he presents his writings, which I found quite refreshing.
Scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Acquinas of Sicily—who synthesized Christian theology with aristotelian philosophy—contended that the ‘supernatural’ comprised in "God's unmediated actions" while the ‘natural’ is "what happens always or most of the time," and the ‘preternatural’ is "what happens rarely, but nonetheless by the agency of created beings... “ In "What I Did Learn", Vorhees goes full throttle for the macabre and melancholy in this ’preternatural‘ self revelatory poem. I say ‘preternatural’ because having been voraciously reading early twentieth-century poetry like Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings since the eighth grade, I have never come across a Vorhees-like style and I consider myself as having been around the ‘poetic block’ a few times.
As I read these words I felt like an exposed viscera on legs, figuratively inside/out vibes. Like Frost, Vorhees investigates complex social and philosophical themes with mastery but with a poignant bout of relatable and humbled vulnerability which is the plight and euphoria, conundrum and exaltation of any type of artist. Could Vorhees be described as an itinerant troubadour who, in the middle ages, was the shining knight of poetry? Or maybe he's just a guy with something to say about some things that matter to him, and he conceivably hopes that they matter to you as well.
The poems read like a heuristic and socratic exercise replete with mythical biblical and literary symbolisms. While we're at it, why not add Mimetic Theory to the list? Although the book is replete with an infelicitous subject matter, after reading it, your resistance to transfiguration could conceivably be an exercise in futility; you will emerge from the chrysalis of self-consciousness to a wisdomed sage having been dug up from the darkness of an egregious past and exposed to ebb and flow of a reformatory present through poetic light and historical literary erudition. Nothing is nugatory, every word, every nuance seems carefully selected, with fluid paradoxical wordplay and intrigue, cajoling the reader to read on and hopefully decode the cleverly coded script.
Vorhees writes with ingenuity, authenticity, and authority. A MUST read for anyone willing to trek a trip down a dark path with a promise of light ahead. The stuff of LIFE! A familiar trope done in an unfamiliar way...a literary TRIUMPH!
—Jacques Fleury, author of You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self
