The Shaman Song

The work of Robert Bruwer never disappoints. He offers the pain of metamodernist "life out of balance" while casting a nostalgic poetic cold eye back through the history of the literary canon, showing how we devolved from romantics like Shelley through modernists like Yeats and Eliot to our current "fridge magnet poetry" era. All this is accomplished through enticing wordplay, double entendre and surreal allusions. Simultaneously, Robert's work is an incantation of the shaman's impermanent beating heart-drum, offering spiritual redemption from this vale of tears. It is almost an insult to try and "review" these panoramic, existential epics of such depth... any comment by definition will fall short in a similar fashion to Lao Tzu's quote: "The way that can be named is not the way." Truly the work of a talented poet, and these poems are a shining star on art's lonely hilltop.