Sleepwalking In The Void: A Review of CRUDELY MISTAKEN FOR LIFE

Available through Small Press Distribution at http://www.spdbooks.org and the Epic Rites website at http://www.epicrites.org.

CRUDELY MISTAKEN FOR LIFE is a book of poetry that uses darkness to get to the light.  More than that, it is one of those rare books in which the darkness is the light.  The power of darkness gives us the other side.  Hank Williams said it best when he said, “There ain’t no light.”  Then he gave us through his songs a darkness which transcended darkness and light.  A new kind of light found in a darkness in which you no longer want the light.  Wolfgang Carstens writes with this same kind of transcendence.  In a poem about his father, “happy birthday, Mr. Cool,” Carstens gives us a shuddering portrayal of a darkness so powerful that the only ending can be one of emotional ice.  And yet... and yet... there is a primal strength that is expressed most vividly in the stark honesty of the darkness.  The lead poem of the book, “fragments of a dream remembered,” unveils the theme:

my nightmares of late mirror
reality and are increasingly
more difficult to abandon
in favor of returning
to the sad drama of flesh.

perhaps that’s how we know
the hour of our end approaches -
when nightmares are more joyous
than reality, and passing from one
dream to another is as easy
as never again opening our eyes.

The metaphor of sleep as a prelude or substitute for death is again marvelously honed in the title poem, “crudely mistaken for life.”  The setting is the back room of a funeral home “where bodies/lie dreaming on shiny metal tables” and:

humans spend one third
of their living in preparation
for a morgue drawer, beds
are staging grounds for graves,
slumber is dress rehearsal for death.

But again, Wolf Carstens gives us something else.  Through the darkness itself, there is a breakthrough.  In response to the mortician asking if he has ever seen a corpse prepared for burial, Carstens answers:

“yeah,” i say, “i’ve seen corpses
prepared for burial
the streets are full of sleepwalkers
with eyes stapled shut, lips sewn shut
to the magic and mystery of blood
and bone living; drained, emptied
with no sign of a pulse, the stench
of death seeping from their mouths
sleepwalking from cradle to grave
with only brief dreams in between -
crudely mistaken for life.”

The power of this passage is remarkable.  Line builds on line, metaphor builds on metaphor, to reach an incredible ending which yields a line so strong it becomes the title of the book.

Death, mortality, memory of the deceased, abandonment, suicide, and grief are all themes in this book.  But rather than evoking hopelessness, Carstens evokes a deepening, a transfiguration.  He also evokes an intimacy, for how better to know a person than to experience the immediacy of that person’s darkness.  Here is a passage from the poem I mentioned before, “happy birthday, Mr. Cool”:

sadly, apart from his toughness,
his only other discernible skill in life was drinking.
it was incredible how he poured vodka
into a tall glass, added a splash of Kahlúa
and guzzled it down in one long uninterrupted gulp.

he went from stone cold sober
to shitfaced in 30 seconds –
you could actually watch his eyes glaze
and cross before his empty glass hit the table.
the last time i saw him was Thanksgiving 1995.
i hadn't been there more than 20 minutes
and he was already trashed beyond repair.
after falling and destroying a glass table
he tumbled down steep basement steps
and couldn't climb back up –
when i went to help him
his third wife Janice screamed, "don't fucking
help him! if he can't get up the stairs under his own
steam then he doesn't deserve to fucking eat."
so i left him down there in the dark
bleeding from his nose and mouth,
crumpled on the cold concrete floor
like a wet, dirty towel.

This book is stunningly evocative.  Be careful when you pick up this book, you might not be able to put it down.