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Valentin Per Lind
Author
Corvix
Corvix is the definitive collection of Valentin Per Lind’s poetry, written between 1985 and 2022, complete with the original author’s notes that explore the central themes of the poems and the inspiration behind them. The book, then, differs from a conventional volume of poetry and assumes the form of a series of poems and essays which range from the Romantic tradition to gritty social realism. Adopting an experimental approach to rhyme and meter, and frequently mixing prose and poetic styles, he hopes the reader will find the poems fresh and exhilarating. Per Lind fervently believes that poetry should encompass all forms of human experience, even those we instinctively turn away from.
Reviews
The dead dance in Corvix, Lind’s compendium of collected verse, a corpus spanning decades, plumbing death and desire with a Romantic’s love of land and weather and the spirits that course through existence, digging to the heart of ritual and belief with the hunger of a seeker and the boldness of a blasphemer. Always he finds beauty in terror and terror in beauty. “I would make a fine meal, my sweet, /For you to peck at,” Lind writes, in the title poem, a paean to a woman who seems to have “a skein of blood upon thy ruby lips.” Elsewhere, he offers a new prologue to Macbeth and a celebration of M.R. James, a necromancer’s rite summoning the dead (the haunting, pared down “Evocation of a Spirit of Vengeance”), and evocations of lost or haunted places (“By Saddleworth Moor” imagines the spirit of its “bleak and barren” land to be a father who, driving the M62, lost his family in an accident).

One crucial throughline: Saturnalia, ancient gods, and the connection of the human, the divine, and Nature itself. Fitting those interests, the verse echoes back to Coleridge and Poe, in form and language, though Lind balances some proudly archaic language (“As wandered thou ’mong silver’d trees”) with the directly stated, especially in later works. “And yet the moment when I succumbed / To the anaesthesia of life / Eludes me,” Lind writes in the standout “The Constant Watch,” a consideration of the diminishment, over decades, of the intensity with which one feels.

Death, of course, has an erotic charge in these rich, rewarding poems, as do the acts of creation that led to this world. That powers the keystone work “Priapus,” a declarative piece in the voice of “Pan” or God or whatever name one might choose—in one of many illuminating notes, Lind calls it “the expression of the ‘Primal Will to Be.’” The notes and essays are clear-eyed yet surprising, warm yet provocative, setting down an independent mind’s understanding of Nature, poetry, witchcraft, Paganism, and the soul itself.

Takeaway: Evocative poems, inspired by the Romantics, of ancient gods, haunted lands, and the erotic charge of death.

Great for fans of: Donald Wandrei, Kathryn Hinds.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

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