Sung: Ink in love & lust by Mick Raubenheimer

Raubenheimer’s voice is a unique one – a solitary one – one that is rarely heard in South Africa, or even rarely heard this side of consciousness. Some of these poems are like snapshots – short-lined, frequently employing eye-popping wordplay, but always with precision and economy of measure. They can be light-hearted and humourous, yet still cast a pebble into the depths of profundity or even blackness, fear, dark rituals – ‘the violence of magic’. There is eroticism too, whether in the short-lined poems or the longer works – longer lines, greater in length – but again always with inventiveness, wordplay, and surreal imagery – ‘I sat atop her smile like a brief god taken flight’. And despite the brevity of some of the poems, they are not superficial reads and demand a careful, slow rereading, stepping over each word or image carefully like on stones in a rural stream or on ledges across dizzying crevices.

—Gary Cummiskey, poet, editor Dye Hard Press.

This collection is a master class in brevity, an art not many poets are able to master. The short poems move effortlessly in the space of haiku with startling images that force the reader to go back and back again to find the gold in the lines. His prose poem experiments are like short, poetic novels – sublime, dreamlike in their intensity and eroticism. This collection is fearless. It bristles with a unique vision of the world, love, lust and ultimately what it means to be human.

Gerard Rudolf, poet, Orphaned latitudes

How wonderfully inventive is language in this space. Raubenheimer tosses ideas, feelings, the natural world into a cauldron of imagery, captivating and freeing the senses from the lull of centuries, and throws open the secret passageways of love. His prose and verse sinuously glide off your skin, trapping eternities of bliss in synapses of longing. His pen shapes verse into wordless wonder so that the reader becomes lost in a mystical circle of life. He knits tales of the Gods, in diaphanous swirls of galaxies and distils them into the throes of passion. The writer is a puppet for the Muse. Her divine bidding bleeds out onto his page. How instantaneously he traverses time-frames, from prehistoric pangs to sacred couplings. Lush language has been woven by a master artist into leaps of pure delight.

—Zena John, poet, Sanctum.

Moving in a space between the blatant and the subtle, between whimsy and passion, provocation and allurement, Raubenheimer’s poems render landscapes of desire and physicality through a word choice that ensures each poem is a doorway to multiple possible epiphanies. In contrast to a society that often forgets the very essences of desire, in these pieces eros is foregrounded, and described, detailed, narrated and evoked in the best poems through surprising contrasts and verbal lines of flight. Often transgressive, these poems are fluid; both in their rhythms and format, and in much of their imagery and contents. Their movement and essentiality is perhaps summed up in the poet’s own words: “in the confines of any one freed moment infinity rests – emancipation from the linear: aesthetics.”

—Kyle Allan, poet, editor New Coin poetry journal

Mick Raubenheimer was born into the crude darkness of Krugersdorp, Transvaal (now Gauteng), South Africa in 1979 – he leaps in ink and slips in sensation. He hopes one day to see Fawlty Towers on IMAX.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 84 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-432-1

$18

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