Rain Mirror: New Poems

by Michael McClure

"Rain Mirror", writes poet Michael McClure, "is my most bare and forthright book. It contains two long poems, 'Crisis Blossom' and 'Haiku Edge' which are quite disparate from one another". Yet brought under a single cover, the poems compliment each other as do light and dark, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Yin and Yang. "Haiku Edge" is a serial poem of linked haikus in the American idiom. Often humorous, sometimes harsh, always elegant, they catch moments in the landscape of Oakland's East Bay Hills where McClure now lives. "Crisis Blossom" in contrast is a long poem in three parts ("Graftings", "After the Solstice", and "After Meltdown") that record the poet's months' long shock and recovery after a near-fatal airplane accident. It is, in McClure's words, "my state of psyche, capillaries, muscles, fears, boldnesses, and hungers, down where they exist without management". With Rain Mirror, the poet moves in two directions, inward and outward, to arrive at the balance point between the self and There's Me/and no me/on the other side/I'm here under hand/And There/where thoughts glide".

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

Michael McClure (born October 20, 1932 in Marysville, Kansas) is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's Big Sur.

Reviews

[victoria · Rating 2 out of 5]

beautiful dreamy consciousness hiakus. half the book though is his 'crisis blossom', an intensely introspective dive into mcclure's past of (seemingly) sexual addiction and guilt. intense, with beautiful imagery interwoven with self-reflective struggles. another book of his might be better as an intro to his work.

[mwpm · Rating 3 out of 5]

OH ACCIDENT!
Oh,
per
fect
(( CRUSHED ))
snail
- LIKE
A
STAR

gone out
!

- pg. 3

* * *

THE BUTTERFLY
IN
SUNLIGHT
!
Ah,
light show
at
the
Filmore

- pg. 25

* * *

NOW I UNDERSTAND THE SEXUAL ADDICTION
of my young manhood
was a CRUCIFIXION -
glittering and lovely
AS
an ostrich boa and smashed mirrors
seen on acid.

Now
I see that perception is a shape
of the darkness
S
E
E
I
N
G
itself.
Naked bodies in layers
on shelves in space,
and behind stalactites,
alight with themselves
seduce me
with fleshly softness
of their meat.
Calves.
Forearms.
And the perfumes!
THE PERFUMES ARE LOST
AS MOTHS
IN OUR HORMONAL STORMS
but they direct us.
- They guided me.

- grafting one, pg. 37

* * *

HEARTACHE NEWS WITH THE TORTURED FACES
and grim boredom verging on insolence,
and a rifle slung over the shoulders.
Lines of meaningless glyphs slither past
beneath a band of silver
ON
BLACK.
THE SALMON MUST KNOW
how to find its stream,
and the absence of thorns
I
S
the absence
of odor. Perfume
the color of pink-tinted pewter.

C
H
I
L
D
R
E
N
smile in the bodies
of grownups.
A
H
!

- bud, pg. 58

* * *

S
K
U
L
L
AND
CROSS BONES

sing to the roots
of the tulip tree,
"Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid
courted by Incapacity."

Wild streams pour under the sidewalks
through domestic earth.
THIS
ONE
TIME
is
a
last
one
and a beginning
BIRTH.

"Every time we say goodbye
I die a little."

THIS
ONE
TIME
is
a
last
one
and a beginning
BIRTH.

- pg. 81-82

[Giulia Goldston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well made collection of few long poems. Didn't love all of them, but the ones I liked I liked a lot. Some nice connections made on the note of nature and the kinds of inventions that we use to destroy the earth, thoughts on fear of death, and of seasons. This book is a book for the outdoors.

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in Rain Mirror reflect or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say refract jarring juxtapositions of flashing mind-images which give indications of a troubled mind, going through a psychological battle after a near brush with death (in a plane accident). Someone once said that a poem is a "graph of the mind moving". If that is so, McClure's state of mind when he wrote these poems was both beautiful and at times disturbing. As the poet's first book to be published after his superb Simple Eyes, an extremely hard act to follow, McClure has done what Radiohead did post-OK Computer, that is take a completely different direction in art and come from left-of-field and surprise everyone.
This is worth reading but if you are new to McClure, I suggest you try something else such as Hymns to St. Geryon, Dark Brown or September Blackberries.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M1286r 1999