Ebook: Nearer to Never: Poems

Finalist for the 2017 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize presented by Utica College

A poetic examination of what’s waiting just beneath every day experience. As the title suggests, the poems in R. S. Mason’s Nearer to Never paradoxically comprise a book of the unmanifest, a poetic examination of what’s waiting just beneath everyday experience. Recalling Blake, Baudelaire, and Eliot, Mason addresses the innately sacred, melding philosophy, aesthetics, and Buddhist precepts into a lyrical work that is truly modern and avant-garde. Rendered in a straightforward lyrical style, the poems are oddly comprehensible, at times darkly humorous. The language is fresh, elemental, and ludic; the writing is clean, direct, and empowered. Some poems wrestle with the conclusion that life reduces itself to some mere, otherworldly absence; while others reveal the false prison of the ideal, either humanistically or religiously constructed. The poems invite a reader’s most intimate aesthetic engagement, through the technique of radical doubt or, in the Buddhist tradition, “beginner’s mind”—whereby each poem unlocks. In his debut, Mason drives poetry beyond the well-worn schisms established in the previous century, successfully showing that the irreconcilable can cohere, and the inexpressible can, at the most, be sketched. “Zip” I will not ascend on an engine A bobble scope, a space-kit Nor breathe pure oxygen As I rumble through the finite ‘What’s indestructible Is fragile’ I would utter In my voice-box! Rambling through The depth and breadth Without ever Blasting off