Harri Asi. Verses from the unsung. Self-published, Calgary 2003, 169 pg.
Estonian born Calgary resident Harri Asi's first published collection of English language poetry reads like an electric shock, jumping from the page lightning-fast into the reader's mind. One does not need, as Asi writes, "a degree in anything negative // and promote stupendous things// born out of impossible happenings" to catch that existentialist zap. These are not simply verses from the unsung; this collection is more a provocation, a strong, manly grip on common angst expressed uncommonly well. Many existentialists mangle the language for little effect. Asi's command of carefully chosen expressions in his self-exploratory poetry is brutally honest and powerful, no such existentialist shortcoming to be found.
The poet misleads us when he calls himself a "mean junkyard dog // always barking up the wrong tree // without a cat". By no means are the vociferous verses within addressed to the wrong tree. By concentrating on "all the ugly realities in my pocket", the ugly afflictions of modern mankind, the poet sets out on the classic safari - seeking the Holy Grail that he terms the lost beauty of life. This collection is not, as fair warning, an easy one to read in one sitting. Asi gives cause for pause on the obverse of the title page - "the faint-hearted should not read this book".
The forewarned brave reader, - anyman, everyperson - encounters much of what is common to our daily strivings throughout, word-painted in a grim, brutally sharp caustic economical style. Asi's own jagged-edged illustrations add to the impact of the poetry. Yet, while this collection seems initially to be a vessel overflowing with the venom and vitriol that one associates more with the Crad Kilodney type street poets, Asi maintains a sense of humour throughout as he flays our protective psychological veneer to the quick, the flesh pared to the bone.
The absurdity of the human existence is the poet's domain, the shimmering facades easily penetrated by a rapier sharp pen. The poet is tired of waiting for revelations, his "senses get bruised // chasing your image // around the sharp corners of a day." Nay, he scrubbed the "dark mirrors of night", keeping "vigil // at endless birth-bleeding dawns // and probed the periodic blood of sunsets// ". And then, "waiting turns to grief". There is no fatalism, but perhaps intense obsession. This is most powerfully expressed in his keywords, to which he returns time and again. Waiting, always waiting - "in the prism of medusa's hypnotic eye // endless dimensions of waiting are pointing to the void." Darkness and death dominate his quasi-surrealistic poemscapes, but perhaps the most intense imagery is evoked by the power of the sea, crashing word-waves roil from page to page in a seething maelstrom of emotion.
Asi invokes throughout all the cataclysmal imagery of the impending apocalypse. The fourth horseman, Death, rides roughshod on thundering hooves upon these pages. Yet on this tormented journey it is not all decay and rot. Doors of the mind open, spectacular things promise their appearance; a kernel of hope is fertilized in the soil of unconcerned time. It is what keeps us reading, it is why this existentialist shock-wave sings the body electric rather than screaming fatigue, defeat, hopelessness.
Asi sees himself as peer to Eliot's Tiresias - "In the absence of everything // and presence of nothing // blind visionaries and prophets // have become an endangered species." One is strongly reminded of Shelley's Ozymandias - "look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!" Yet, strangely, after intense exposure to decay, shattered existence, Asi's passions survive repeated readings not as testament to wrack and ruin, but as evidence of new vistas to explore. The questions and doubts expressed by the poet, are not denials, a nihilistic destruction of the questionable world around us but a challenge to enter his world, the realm of the unsung. A challenge worth meeting, by any means, a powerful book by a master of the poetic arts.