Ghosts of Past and Future: Selected Poetry / Darrell Schweitzer. Borgo Press, 2008 (trade paperback 978-1-4344-8204-4). 125 pages.

Darrell Schweitzer is an author and editor of dark or “weird” fantasy, and a scholar of speculative fiction in general. I have long been a fan of his efforts in these areas, as my previous reviews of a number of his works attest. He is also, however, a poet of note, and I confess to having previously read almost none of his poetry, though aware of its repute of exhibiting the same sense of wonder, melancholy, and dark humor as his other writings. My only excuse is my tendency to avoid modern poetry, which I find, in general, formless, tedious, and unreadable. This despite having written a considerable amount of verse myself, in both traditional and free forms.

I decided to rectify this failing by investigating his verse collection, Ghosts of Past and Future: Selected Poetry (Borgo Press, 2008). It’s a compact volume, packing into 125 pages fifty poems (organized thematically into four sections), along with notes, credits and an author blurb. It does not feel packed, though; most of the verses occupy no more than 1-2 pages, the typeface is clean and legible, and there is enough negative space on each page to allow the pieces to breathe. For no particular reason, I started reading the book back to front, skipping pieces that didn’t immediately spark my interest, and within part of an evening found I had already gone through two thirds of the book. I finished the next day, reading mostly in the other direction, with due attention to the poems passed over the first time.

From this you will gather it is a quick read, and it is. That is not to say that Schweitzer’s verse doesn’t lack weight or hold one’s attention. It most certainly does, just as it shows, as reported, the qualities inherent in his other work. If the poems have a common theme, it is a meditation on mortality, infused with a nostalgia for the past even in those pieces set in the future. Taken together, they delicately mourn and mock the common fate of humanity, in a delicate, wistful and understanding manner, suffered with notes of both horror and humor. I find his touch lighter here than in much of his fiction, which somehow makes the often bitter pill of his message go down easier. As usual, he thrives on incongruous twists to the inevitable. There may be but one pathway and one destination, but the journey is seldom as one might expect.

This is, as intimated, modern verse, mostly free, even conversational, in form, despite which it does read as true poetry rather than chopped-up prose, with an impressive quickness of invention and vividness of imagery. Donald Sidney Fryer, quoted on the back cover, states Schweitzer “has mastered a fine and very flexible kind of syllabic line, part free, part blank verse, achieving many definitive and memorable passages that haunt the shared corridors of our collective imagination.” It would be difficult to express the characteristics of his poetry better, so I won’t attempt to, other than to note that it goes down so smoothly you don’t really notice the hints at structure, even while receiving their benefits.

The sections into which the verses are sorted are “Intimations Beyond Mortality” (31 poems), “The Matter of Britain” (4), “Post-Homerica” (8), and “Yesterday’s Tomorrow” (7). The first is more miscellaneous than the others, with a succession of somber meditations on situations, fears, and locales, character sketches, and unheralded digressions (notably “Cautionary Tale,” on Jack Sprat, and “A Barbaric Song,”). The next two focus more narrowly on Arthurian and Greek legendry while drawing from much the same vein, and the last the bygone literature that forms the bedrock of modern science fiction and fantasy.

Within the verses so sorted, there’s an exploration of survivor’s guilt in Heaven, the tale of a would-be knight who spends much of his career in the form of a dog, a series of demystifications of epic literature (“they sure eat a lot in epics”), a recasting of the heroes of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core as discoverers of Dante’s Inferno rather than Pellucidar, the unveiling of the emptiness at the core of a glorious galactic empire, and a look at the lost worlds of previous eras of literature as they fall victim to Globalization. We encounter the Elfland of Lord Dunsany, survey the ruin Mark Twain made of Sir Thomas Mallory’s Britain, and expose the sweeping, simplistic genocides of pulp era space opera. We meet Odysseus and Helen, Tom O’Bedlam, Thomas the Rhymer, the emperors Julian and Justinian, King Arthur, and Edgar Allan Poe. We listen to the stony colloquy of the Colossi of Menon. We meet Schweitzer himself, reflecting on his own experiences, on one or two occasions.

There is fun along the way, but a serious undercurrent, even if sometimes presented in a semiserious way. The poems may go down easy but may not be quite so easy on the digestion.

Ghosts of Past and Future is a miraculous book, that you really shouldn’t deny yourself. It’s well worth the effort of seeking out.

—Brian.