by Anthony Bernstein

Created on: February 18, 2010

Double Visions by Bruce Boston with fellow poets

2009, Dark Regions Press, ISBN 1-88893-66-9

66 pages - $7.95 paperback

Bruce Boston's latest volume of poetry from ‘Dark Regions Press’ Double Visions is a beautifully haunting, enchantingly soul-stirring collection of twenty-one collaborative inspirations that feed the head while whispering vast and secret wonders to the heart. Here literary master Bruce Boston teams up with ten of today’s foremost speculative poets to create a fantastical array of fully realized, oft times frightening, mindscapes brimming with mythic splendor and bizarre horrors alike.  On the whole these are acutely insightful works that display an intimate understanding of spiritual longing, loneliness, and the human condition at large – they are deeply layered with meanings less tangible that speak to the reader on a variety of subtle levels. 

Most of the poems in Double Visions made there debut during the late 80s, 90s and early part of this decade, appearing in top speculative publications such as Amazing Stories, Strange Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares as well as over half a dozen Rhysling Award Anthologies.  Three appear in print here for the first time, including a stylishly ghoulish seasonal poem entitled Carnival of Ghosts with Marge Simon (who also contributes a work of art) that captures the “spirit” of Halloween most aptly.  It tells the woeful tale of an annual All Hallows Eve haunting of regretful, reminiscent souls.

“Our harsh laughter

spills into the alley

along with dusk.

Regret hangs like fog

above the raucous sounds:

a rush of sins

without redemption

from memory’s grave.”

Many of the poems in Double Visions are profoundly psychological in nature, some being deeply introverted.  To Dance With Shiva, with David Hunter Sutherland, is an intense, robustly visual piece that forecasts what benefits the future of virtual reality could hold for us in the field of psychotherapy if the technology were to be developed as a constructive therapeutic tool.  The Web, with Gary William Crawford, is a brief, savagely brooding work of gothic free-verse that intimately explores the horrors of mental illness.  It describes being systematically destroyed by ones own personal demons: monsters born of, and perpetuated by, the illness.  The Web is one of three works with Mr. Crawford that appear in this volume.  All take place in the mythical “Shadow

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