CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
by Robert Frazier and Bruce Boston
A5, 80pp p/b, $8.85 from Horror's Head Press, 140 Dickie Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10314, USA.
As we near the close of the century, the rain forest has become one of the most potent images of man's selfish destruction of his natural environment. Yet just as the real forest is stripped for its resources, so its image is readily plundered by writers to suit their own individual purposes. In Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest, however, the tables are turned, and the forest is back in control.
This is immediately evident from Lucius Shepard's introduction. He describes how he agrees to guide a young New York couple on a trip into the Petén, in the hope of fraying their relationship enough to get off with the woman. Four days into the journey, tempers are failing and things look hopeful, when their camp is approached by a stranger horribly disfigured by jungle diseases. The story he tells draws the couple closer again and Shepard's lust is frustrated, but he is not disappointed. He realises that the meeting has changed him, that his thoughts have been orchestrated by the jungle, that a small but miraculous shift in reality has returned his sense of mystery.
Illustrating explicitly what Frazier and Boston may choose only to imply, Shepard's introduction primes the reader for the journey ahead. In the 23 pieces – 8 by Frazier, 10 by Boston, and 5 collaborations – the two poets sketch out a rain forest that is magical, immense and mysterious. It is a melting pot of genetic activity, rife with new species too numerous and changing too fast to ever hope to catalogue, of biological activity that makes man seem puny and helpless in comparison:
A carnivorous mushroom spore roots on my exposed forearm
and Tomaz must dig deeply beneath the flesh to excise
the wrinkled neon growth which has sprouted in minutes.
("Return to the Mutant Rain Forest")
Above all, Frazier and Boston create a new mythology for the rain forest that combines ancient Mayan mysticism, Caribe supersitition, and the image of the panther as supreme beast of the forest. A people of "clever felines who walk upon two feet" inhabits the interior, while sleek, dark succubi transform the substance and sanctum of the night in a way that no human lover could achieve. A dangerous new religion portrays the Second Coming as feline, the crucifix of an impaled panther is a religious symbol outlawed in the Northern Cities.
All but three of the poems have appeared individually since 1986 in a wide variety of professional and small-press markets, but brought together in one volume, the product is certainly greater than the sum of the parts. The leitmotifs now have time to build and resonate within the reader, the forest itself assumes a potent and overpowering charisma, its mythology restored and our respect for it reaffirmed.
Just as the unexpected stranger in the jungle brought about a change in Shepard and his two companions, the chronicles presented by Frazier and Boston cannot fail to affect the reader. As Shepard concludes in the introduction: "Perhaps herein you will undergo a change, and perhaps you will neither notice it nor obey its imperatives. No one can know in advance what use the jungle will make of them. However, if you have knowledgeable guides – guides such as Robert Frazier and Bruce Boston – you may be led to a site where some improbable stranger may appear, where a simple dialogue may engage the lie of the world so profoundly that something more poignant than simple truth will be revealed, where the dreams that make us real are common stuff and the mysteries we breathe are born."
AFTER THE ANDROID WARS
by John Francis Haines
A5, 4pp, 20p + A5 SAE from John Howard, 15 Oakwood Road, Bracknell, Berks RG12 2SP. Number 12 in the House of Moonlight Poetry leaflet series produces five short pieces themed loosely on the lot of the android. From the shock of apartheid in "Equal Opportunities" to the aftermath of rebellion in the title poem, the futility and emptiness of the android's existence is by turns poignant and provocative.
