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JACKET 15 - December 2001 | # 15
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Gabriel Gudding reviewsDaylight Savings Sex by Randolph HealyPublished by Wild Honey Press, 16A Ballyman Road, Bray County Wicklow,
Ireland, in March 2001 in an edition of 200.
ISBN 1 903090 28 8 |
Warning, anagrams passim.Sex is a ghastly kind of diving. Randolph Healy is one of the most
important of the new Irish writers. His press, Wild Honey Press, is
committed to printing unusual work in unusual volumes. All of Wild Honey’s
books are thoughtfully designed and carefully made. Just so with Randolph
Healy’s latest chapbook, Daylight Saving Sex. In additionyou
can read aboutsex. Randy Healy indeed. Appealing delicate chapbook
weird picture on cover and back. On front hilarious high-speed photograph
of apple pierced by bullet like an erection slamming through baguette. On
Back: Some kind of thin microscopic film-creature dividing sexually
underneath a microscope, looking vaguely like eucharist wafer soaked in
blueberry wine or a butterfly marinated in bleach and then backlit by
flashlight. Healy always chooses the weird but appropriate art for the
Wild Honey books. Healy makes all his books himself and sends them across
the oceans and counties and then people read them. Many people read them
now. Healy’s press is probably the best, at the present time, in
Ireland. vineyard milk |
One is reminded of Yeats’ “I walk through the long schoolroom
questioning,” but without the high tone, without the rhetorical
condiments, without the lesson slammed into the esophagus. One reads the
book shaking the head at Healy’s word-play, deftness of conceptual
movement, the emotional shifts, and not least his cultural commentary.
Randolph Healy, like some, forgive the anagram, “holy alpha nerd”, has a
“hyper-anal hold” on language, such that we enjoy where his book grips us
immensely, which is not so much in the anus. A very tight grip: Randolph
Healy is gripping our vulvae and scrota. Indeed, another anagram of
“Randolph Healy” is “Help! A horny lad!” Also here, the family life of the
poet, the Politics, the idea that Time itself can be controlled by the
priesthood. nothing¬hing¬ing¬ing¬ion The chapbook meditates upon the shifting of cultural, verbal, and
temporal frames to reveal both significance and insignificance: “A mite on
an abacus wished it was a fruitbat / white blank black oblivion either
side of this bright day.” “A flaw in a quiz-show thought he was a kazoo /
everyone is singular the entire plane shuddered prepositor or prior.”
Eh!? Livid syntax gags, right? Healy’s humor happens in a hyphen,
in a droll comma, as the poem moves from tight lines that jag left to
right and then flare into paragraphs: sell the slow Healy is like a weed banging on a door. Subtle, insistent, goofy — but
carefully formed and incontrovertibly complex. And ever sad. This book,
and. Healy’s poems, and this one in particular, hold at once a
mathematical precision and an easy playfulness, a humor and a gravity,
that cause a kind of rip in the reader. Daylight Saving Sex: syntax
hides vile gags, indeed. The book, like all Wild Honey books, can be
obtained from Wild Honey Press, at 16a Ballyman Road, Bray, Co. Wicklow,
Ireland, or by sending an email to poetry@wildhoneypress.com. |
J A C K E T # 15 Contents
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magazine 2001 |