Suicide hotline operators should simply read from Edson. This is life affirming stuff. I insist you also get his new one, The Tormented Mirror, and anything by James Tate, especially Shroud of the Gnome. These two will startle even the most steadfast poetry-haters.

Don't let yourself get all tangled in the arguments over what is and isn't a prose poem, or even if such an oxymoronic creature is possible. It doesn't matter what you call them, these things by Russell Edson are great fun and great reading.

Most of these pieces are about a page long, and many are considerably shorter. They are moments of dreams, newsreels from some surreal purgatory, portraits of impossibility. In this world, "Mr Is went into the woods to think about his wooden head," and "A woman had given birth to an old man." Within the oddity and amidst the strangeness are moments of tenderness, passion, horror. Read slowly and carefully, these words somehow seem to reflect the world we trudge through and the life we lead, and so add contours to our boring reality. There is a lot of melancholy here; it comes perhaps from the confusions and juxtapositions, but there is nothing to fear, and plenty to love, for, as Edson writes, "In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy..."

I read this book with a poetry reading book club and it was one of the club's favorites. Edson writes often surreal philosophical fables which are easy to enter into because of their familiar, "There once was a woman who..." language. However, this river runs deep.

Russell Edson is my favorite poet. The Tunnel (his selected poems) is filled with genius. Almost every poem of his I'd previously read had something intriguing about it, something ranging from the merely curious to the truly wonder-evoking.

At first I thought that The Tormented Mirror was a book of throw-aways culled together by the editor of Pitt Press. I read the book four times, and each time I came away feeling disappointed. The poems in this book are a bit more crude, and on the average, less sophisticated than the best poems in The Tunnel. I tired of the over-emphasis on body parts and functions. In general I'm all for Edson's bizarre forays into the ultra-Freudian mentality, but I kept feeling that The Tormented Mirror was obsessed with the most overt and simplistic Freudian reactions while neglecting the complexities and depth that Freud himself, or classically, Edson, would have seen in the dark marshes of the unconscious. Then I heard Edson read the poems. There's a Real Video of an entire reading given at Arizona State University on line (http://www.asu.edu/clas/english/creativewriting/marshall/edson/). It was the first opportunity I had to hear Edson read his work, and I was very impressed. His voice is deep, resonant and filled with wickedly satirical drama. His ASU reading devoted about half the time to this book and half to old favorites (from The Tunnel).

With the benefit of Edson's voice and performance, I realized that the poems of the Tormented mirror are not deficient, but simply lighter than his best work. They are more comedic, and Edson's reading (complete with bouts of chuckling) demonstrates the comedy. When he read them in line with his older poems, they blended seamlessly, and the reading was truly a delight.

So I returned to this review, originally a rather mean one, to rectify my error. I had demanded too much of Edson originally, probably because his writing is so important to me. I sympathize deeply with his status as "Poet of the Unconscious." In some ways, he doesn't do the unconscious as much justice in this book as in the best efforts of his past. He draws more from the sexually repressed, id-terrorized personal unconscious in the Tormented Mirror than he did in some of his earlier poems, which carry more mystery, oddly-resonating logic, and deeper, more universal palpitations of the human animal and its beleaguered brain. Still, these poems are great fun, and definitely worth a read if you are familiar with and enjoy Edson's writing. If you are new to Edson, don't start here. The Tunnel is the book to get. The Tormented Mirror strikes me as more for the Edson aficionado. But, by all means, watch the ASU reading before you buy this book. At times, The Tormented Mirror lacks a lighted pathway to understanding Edson's voice, and the ASU reading will work as a starry night to navigate by.

Another weakness of this book in view of the poems in The Tunnel is a relative lack of wonderful language and linguistic pyrotechnics. Edson is a genius, but not just for his weird masterful manipulations of logic. He is also a master of metaphor and amazing phrases. The language in The Tormented Mirror is less electrified than the Edson poems I love most, which adds to its seemingly simplistic crudeness. My recommendation is to read these poems very slowly with a heightened sense of wry drama. In the past, Edson has utilized strange phraseology to send your tongue and ear tripping into the proper rhythm for the specific poem. Here, the very basic language would seem to encourage faster reading. You will have to trip your own tongue to best appreciate these poems, and after you become resigned to this, the poems will best expose their polymorphously perverse sensibilities.

There are some great bits where Edson's language is in classic form, though. In "Sleep," a neat little poem about insomnia, a man suffers from being an 'unprofessional' sleeper in need of training. Edson writes:
"He needed a sleeping master, who with a whip and a chair could discipline the night, and make him jump through hoops of gasolined fire. Someone who could make a tiger sit on a tiny pedestal and yawn ..."

More frequently though, the language of the poems is more silly and humorous than magical. For instance, in "Sunset," a poem about a person who sits in a stranger's window eclipsing the stranger's view of a sunset with a large posterior. Argument ensues as the owner of the window tries to get the owner of the posterior to leave. The owner of the large backside says:
"I was tired and saw your open window and thought to sit on your sill until I was less tired. I even took my pants down to give my backside a more natural look. Experience has taught me that people prefer to see something almost as natural as a sunset in their windows ..."

Another poem, "The Reality Argument" opens with a wonderful line, "Who has not awakened in the night wondering if the illness called childhood was not borne by an infestation of dolls?" but degenerates by the end into infantile sexual curiosity, seemingly neglecting the other exquisite non-sexual possibilities. Almost all the poems are good for at least a laugh, though, and that is not a bad thing. A very short poem, "The Rule and Its Exception," is dumb, absurd, and hilarious at once, and serves as a good illustration of how the Tormented Mirror is best treated as a sweet little literary confection and not a multiple-course meal:
"The big toe located on each of the two feet of man (Homo sapiens, "man, the wise") has as its main function the growing of a toenail and the production of pain when stepped on ...
Death is the exception to this rule.
Goodbye, my friends ..."

Russell Edson, widely considered the master of the Prose Poem, has produced a magnificent volume of poetry that draws the reader in like a moth to a flame, like a sailor to a siren, like a bear to honey ... Edson's poems freely chart courses from the animal in us to the "civilized" in us to the spiritual in us, and everywhere in-between and even un-nameable places deep within and below us, and high, high above us, near articulation ... These poems are ingenious, and they cannot be summarized, expounded on, or classified into any theme, category, school, or style. They are simply marvelously eccentric and impenetrable masterpieces of prose poetry. You will not penetrate into the heart of these poems, but they will penetrate your heart, your mind, and your spirit! This book is wonderful, and I highly recommend it to everybody.

I had read this book a few years ago, loaned to me by a great teacher. I was only able to read 1/4 of the book when I had to return it. If anyone that reads this knows of where I could retrieve a copy of this book, please inform me.

No one does quite what he does. The Song of Percival Peacock occupies the doorway between your cautious pretensions and your most hidden desires. Intriguing because it is character-driven, unique because it is written entirely in dialogue, this book can only be described as a surreal funhouse, a rollercoaster ride into the subconsious.