Tenebrae in Aeternum

In 2017, Benjamin Blake burst onto the weird poetry scene with the scintillating volume Standing on the Threshold of Madness. In this book, Blake revealed himself to be a skillful weaver of weird verse long and short, each poem carefully etched and filled with vivid, impressionistic images of terror and dread, but not without a touch of poignancy.

 

In this new volume, Blake continues his explorations into weirdness in poetry. Fascinated as he is by the "eternal feminine," Blake melds love, sex, and death in an inextricable fusion in such poems as "Phantasm" and "Succubus." Blake also finds inspiration in the upending of conventional religion, as in the grim lines in "Winchester": "Your God is as useless / As paper houses / In a spring storm."

 

A dark pessimism infuses much of Blake's poetry, leading to such reflections as these: "Some people are nothing but tombs / Filled with dried flesh and dust / Locked from the inside." Elsewhere, Blake tells miniature stories in verse, as in the compact haunted house narrative "Ever So Faint." In all, Benjamin Blake has surpassed the promise of his first volume in this new collection of poetic vignettes.

 

"Benjamin Blake feels many things, and feels them keenly; more to the point, he is able to transmute those feelings into poems of remarkable intensity and power."-From S. T. Joshi's Foreword