Nearer to Never

Poems

By R. S. Mason

Subjects: Poetry, Philosophy, Phenomenology
Series: Excelsior Editions
Imprint: Excelsior Editions
Paperback : 9781438458946, 104 pages, September 2015

Table of contents

Preface
Though I Try So Hard
Entering White
Proper Acts of Vision
Each Time
Flicker
Carousel
Hopper Reconsidered
Deluxe
Ready?
Emily Figueroa
Field Work
Obsolete Systems
Construction
Foreign Planet
Sketch Book
On Mercury!
Hero with One Wing
Aesthetik 1
Bees
Romantique
Icarus Ignored
How It All Goes Down
It
Nearer to Never
Ode to the Material
Hard Luck
Odd Hats
Without You God Is Weak
Beautiful Room
Sorrows of an Ant
Poof!
Exteriors
From the Car
The Unveiling
Love between Phantoms
Cogito
Let X = X
Open Heart Surgery
An Incomplete Account
The Head of a Dog
Experience
In the Gallery of Objects
Graven Images
My Name Is Jack
Invalids
Lost My Shit
Crow Geist
Tea Time
Wirklich (Real)
Harmonicum Nova
Grocery Store Spectacle
Zip
Necessary Violetions
Mrs. Kravitz
Hospital
Inter-world
Blur
In the Eyes of –X
Storm
Robot Theater
Magnitudo
Small Apartments
Unified
Samadhi at Pep Boys
Eternal Return of the Same
Love Poem
Funeral for a Dot
To the Future
Edwin the Maker
Postulate F5
The Super Thing
Shipwreck
Was That You?
Art of the Impossible
Let’s Volunteer!
Local Conditions
Kettle Drummer
A Note
Afterword by David Appelbaum

A poetic examination of what’s waiting just beneath everyday experience.

Description

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

As the title suggest, 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.

R. S. Mason lives in upstate New York.