Review of Panchromatic Obscurity
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- Brendan Donaghy
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Review of Panchromatic Obscurity
Panchromatic Obscurity is a collection of twenty-seven poems by Richard Foley. The first word in the title is a photographic term that refers to film sensitive to the light of all the colors in the visible spectrum. Paired with the second word, the title seems to hint at some oxymoronic tension between what is visible and what remains hidden from sight. Is the author giving us a sense of what we can expect to find in this collection?
My advice to anyone picking up this book is to find a dictionary app on your computer and keep it open while you read. Richard Foley is a writer who likes unusual words; you’ll encounter words like thanatological, vilipends, saponaceous, umbrageous, and caliginous in this work. Aside from the obscure language, the poet makes extensive use of imagery and metaphors that can make his meaning hard to discern. He signs off the introductory note and the acknowledgment with the epithet ‘The Distorted Soul.’ This view of himself manifests in his poetry in the themes of alienation, dislocation, and a feeling of being unfree.
What I enjoyed most about this collection was the writer’s obvious love of language and wordplay. He is a fan of alliteration, for example, as these lines from “Ambivalent Eclipse” show: ‘Perfidy peevishly pierces, / Probity promotes prodigies.’ He is also someone who enjoys a good pun; titles such as “Malice in Wonderland” and “The Lizard of Awes” testify to that fact. The poems I enjoyed most were those that I found more accessible, more panchromatic than obscure. “Frozen Beach” is one of those. Here, the poet is open about his sense of alienation: ‘Even though they are all wearing swimsuits, / I’m still gathering around the notion that, / I am the sole soul who is wandering in a coat…’ He comes back to this theme of being alone in “Beyond The Mayhem”: “Snow must be warmer than me, / Nobody can thaw my forlornness, / I can’t even buy a shadow.” I also liked the prose poem “Stagnant Weltschmerz”, in which he uses a prison cell or box as a metaphor for life itself. It is not the walls that imprison the poem’s narrator, but rather the negative energy of the people who ‘invented a false world that conquers everybody else before they even get started!’ This sense that the world is peopled with frauds and phonies is one he explores further in “Imposters Galore.”
I was less keen on some of the more obscure poems. The writer needs to find a way of combining his obvious fascination with language with the awareness that, ultimately, words are for communication. If others don’t understand the language you are using, you aren’t getting your message across. At one level, he is already aware of this. He writes in “Irony of Epigram”: ‘What am I writing about?! If you don’t know then I am finished!’ Foley has published two additional books after this one; I would be interested in reading these to see how his writing style has developed.
I am giving this book three out of four stars, deducting one star for the obscurity factor. It is an exceptionally well-edited collection as I didn’t find a single error. I also didn’t find anything in the language or themes that would make this book unsuitable for younger readers. This is one for people who enjoy poetry that is challenging, both in its use of language and in its themes.
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Panchromatic Obscurity
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- Mercy119
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