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Dee Rimbaud
The Bad Seed and Dropping Ecstasy with the Angels
Reviewed By Fionna Doney Simmonds
A talented artist who travelled the world in his youth on the back of art scholarships, the foundations of Dee Rimbaud’s two collections of poetry exist in the experiences that influenced his art, spirituality and poetry during that time. The mad, bad and dangerous to know are addressed in poetry of raw emotion, while love poems of exquisite beauty – ‘You are Kali Ma, dancing the Earth to dust / And I am the Perfumed Saint, Exuding insufferable benign sweetness.’ - ‘Frankfurt Airport’ – point towards his versatility, with none of the sentimental clichés many poets of today resort to.
The book covers of ‘The Bad Seed’ and ‘Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels’ are examples of Rimbaud’s visual art. The communist red of ‘The Bad Seed’ surrounds a back and white sketch: a legless figure on a trolley skimming over black and white checks. The empty hole in the torso symbolises the hollow rage Rimbaud expresses in poems such as ‘The Bad Seed’ and the figure is a pawn being sent around the chessboard. Rimbaud sees today’s society at the mercy of the government that controls it. The title poem ‘The Bad Seed ‘ reflects the image. ‘The web is flexible, but tightly spun, allowing the illusion of movement/Whilst holding you fast.’ Everything is dictated to us, for us, socially, politically, economically, under the guise they are free choices. Our occasional fits of restlessness must be seen as primal urges to be free!
Revealing a completely different artistic style, the surreal collage cover of ‘Dropping Ecstasy With the Angels’ continues to judge today’s society and shows a beautiful, woman, calmly smiling amongst the chaos of mouths emitting mobile phones, clock faces embedded in cheeks and a naked accordion player... But it is the woman’s direct gaze and smile that dominates this cover. Is she an angel? Is she one of the women he remembers in his poems touching suicide, death and love? Is she Kali immortalised in ‘When The Thunder Spoke’ ‘Laughing at our thrashing lunacy; / she would undo every one of us.’ Or is she projecting the inner madness many of Rimbaud’s poems address, such as ‘Asylum Antechamber’ ‘…what did you see before you spiralled / So recklessly into the abyss?’
A man of passionate convictions, one of his dominant themes is drug use. Rimbaud celebrates controlled use but condemns addiction. In ‘The Bad Seed’, made up of poems Rimbaud wrote in his early twenties, the haiku strips drug abuse to its barest portrayal. ‘Junk head stares vacant / Black crater eyes reflecting / The black void of sky.’ One emotionless sentence, ‘Opium Haiku #2’ is naked of punctuation, honest and harsh. The repetition of ‘black’ reinforces bleak emotion. In ‘Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels’, Rimbaud explores another side of drug use: ‘I submit; / And in submission, / I am bliss.’ – ‘A Beautiful Chemistry’. The poem, in contrast to ‘Opium Haiku #2’ stretches over six stanzas of varying length. Far from condemning outright drug abuse, Rimbaud voices concern over the government’s refusal to outlaw alcohol and cigarettes despite the medical evidence that verifies its danger to our health. In ‘black night/pink gin’, a poem intended for his upcoming collection, alcohol is condemned:
‘Mother is in the garden, yanking up weeds/ pissed
On pink gin, screaming sour expletives at
The saviour son/ she stares, dead-eyed at
A dead world…’
The construction of lines in this brief stanza is reflective of Rimbaud’s diverse style. The forward slashes split ideas and are used as more substantial and visually arresting pauses, designed to replace the spitting and hissing ‘s’ with the deadening beat of ‘d’. This mirrors a frenzied hysteria dumbing to a funeral march, the extremes of alcohol’s influence. The way Rimbaud uses form and syntax in poetry is exciting. The poem ‘Fragmentation’ is fragments of thought loosely strung together, just managing to maintain coherence. Stanza breaks within sentences or phrases shyly hint at its avowal of infatuation. In ‘The Call’ stanza breaks create separate scenes, even those containing one line. Rimbaud directs a small movie of a man ignoring the call of self-destruction.
Rimbaud writes poems that try to make sense of this world in which we live. He celebrates forces and feelings that we only let ourselves imagine. Dee Rimbaud is an important poet because his poetry understands and meets the need of the current, questioning, searching generation. We are no longer happy to accept platitudes or be compartmentalised. We want to be addressed as individuals and Dee Rimbaud encourages those needs.
For information on how to purchase ‘The Bad Seed’ and ‘Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels’, visit Dee Rimbaud’s website www.thunderburst.co.uk ‘The Bad Seed’ is out of print, but Rimbaud still has a few copies left.
The Bad Seed, £8.95 (inclusive postage and packing), Stride Publications,