Saturday Review: “Impermanent Tableau” a review by David Poston forthcoming in the NCLR Online Spring 2025 of John Amen’s poetry collection, Dark Souvenir (2024).
John Amen’s Dark Souvenir “is dedicated to the poet’s uncle, Richard Sassoon, by all accounts an extraordinary teacher, painter, theater director, and manager, writer, and world traveler,” Poston describes to us in the opening paragraph of his review.
Speaking on the themes, Poston writes, “This collection has three major threads: emotion-driven poems reacting directly to the suicide, narrative-driven poems casting a wider net over past experiences and relationships, and philosophical/spiritual poems, each thread energized by transcendent, vivid surrealistic imagery.” The chaoticism of Sassoon’s art correlates to the subject matter of Amen’s collection of poems.
No easy feat to “keep[s] a delicate balance between nostalgia and regret, between anger and acceptance, between recrimination and celebration. Buddhist concepts of impermanence and the fluidity of consciousness inform these poems both thematically and technically, with constantly shifting personae and speakers, both external and diegetic voices.” The poetry is not a eulogy, but perhaps more of a keening for a life passed.
Read the review here while waiting for the release of the Spring 2025 issue. And order the book here.
