by Steve Pfarrer
KRAKATOA PICNIC
By James Heflin
Hedgerow Books/Levellers Press
www.jamesheflin.com
Poet and science fiction writer James Heflin combines both his interests in his new poetry collection, “Krakatoa Picnic,” which he also leavens with a good bit of the surreal and a dash of humor.
Heflin, a former arts editor for The Valley Advocate and feature writer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, has previously published poetry in “Ploughshares,” “Poetry Ireland Review” and other journals, while his fiction has appeared in “Cafe Irreal” and “The Golden Key.”
In the free verse poems in “Krakatoa Picnic,” published by Levellers Press of Amherst, Heflin ranges from the cosmos to medieval Europe to landscapes beset by strange developments, like the mysterious orbs in “A Little Hut” that descend in Argentina and arrange themselves “in a big number seven above the pampas.”
In work like the prose poem “Light Speed,” Heflin explores the space-time continuum, as a man peering through a telescope one day focuses in on a man who’s also bent over a telescope, wearing what appears to be the same shirt, and eating a bologna sandwich that’s stained his shirt with a bit of mayonnaise.
“That shirt — bottle green, with pockets — was the same one / he himself had ruined with a drop of mayonnaise the year / before. Light speed, he realized.”
The title poem riffs on the solar system’s creation and the wonder of how our modest star sustains our planet, something too often taken for granted: “because after all, that’s the sun / with its bubble and squeak / and not a thing to take lightly / any more than a picnic on Krakatoa.”
And in “Singularity,” Heflin contrasts what some of the first humans might have thought, gazing out on a pristine, Eden-like world, and what humanity now faces in the age of climate change and resource depletion.
“If an apocalypse is to arrive, an apocalypse of modest /proportion or elaborate bombast, nothing can be done to / postpone its arrival. Best, then, to enjoy the slant of the / light, to admire the perfection of the clouds blossoming in / the untraversed sky.”
One reviewer writes, “As its title suggests, ‘Krakatoa Picnic’ is as unsettling as the search for a moment of poetic respite in a world which, by its nature, promises no such thing.”
There will be a book launch for James Heflin’s “Krakatoa Picnic” on Friday at 7 p.m. at Brew Practitioners, 36 Main Street in Florence.
POSING IN PARADISE
By Robert Bruce Stewart
Street Car Mysteries
HarryReeseMysteries.com
Victorian Great Britain may have Sherlock Holmes, but turn-of-the-century America has Harry Reese, a mild-mannered insurance investigator who lives in Northampton and whose work invariably leads him into deeper mysteries — murder, specifically.
The latest installment in the Harry Reese series, a creation of Florence author Robert Bruce Stewart, is “Posing in Paradise” and is set in 1905. Harry must contend with a body he stumbles over in an abandoned canal bed; the body then vanishes not once but twice.
Meantime, one of the era’s great literary lions, Henry James, comes to Northampton to deliver a lecture, and he’s feted in great style — as is an Englishman who’s impersonating him.
Harry’s efforts to unravel these twin mysteries are, as usual, further challenged by his young, eccentric wife, Emmie, a would-be writer who also wants to help Harry’s investigations. But she has a habit of leading him into murkier waters and sometimes causing a bit of public awkwardness in an age of strict decorum.
Consider an early chapter of “Posing in Paradise” after Emmie has a bit too much wine while she and Harry visit Harry’s friend in Connecticut on a warm day. She falls heavily asleep on the train ride back to Northampton.
“For the third time, Emmie’s head fell back against her seat … And then, for the third time, her mouth gaped open. I don’t think I’m betraying a family secret when I say this was not Emmie’s most flattering pose … a constant parade of people sid[led] up and down the aisle, with nearly every one of them stopping a moment to stare at Emmie’s yawning gob.”
“Posing in Paradise” is the sixth book of a series that has been described as “P.G. Wodehouse mixed with a little Agatha Christie …”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.