Jacket 15 — December 2001 | # 15 Contents
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Gabriel Gudding reviewsDaylight Saving Sex by Randolph HealyPublished by Wild Honey Press, 16A Ballyman Road, Bray County Wicklow, Ireland, in March 2001 in an edition of 200. ISBN 1 903090 28 8
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Warning, anagrams passim.Sex is a ghastly kind of diving. Randolph Healy is one of the most important of the new Irish writers. His press, Wild Honey Press, is committed to printing unusual work in unusual volumes. All of Wild Honey’s books are thoughtfully designed and carefully made. Just so with Randolph Healy’s latest chapbook, Daylight Saving Sex. In additionyou can read aboutsex. Randy Healy indeed. Appealing delicate chapbook weird picture on cover and back. On front hilarious high-speed photograph of apple pierced by bullet like an erection slamming through baguette. On Back: Some kind of thin microscopic film-creature dividing sexually underneath a microscope, looking vaguely like eucharist wafer soaked in blueberry wine or a butterfly marinated in bleach and then backlit by flashlight. Healy always chooses the weird but appropriate art for the Wild Honey books. Healy makes all his books himself and sends them across the oceans and counties and then people read them. Many people read them now. Healy’s press is probably the best, at the present time, in Ireland. vineyard milk |
One is reminded of Yeats’ “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning,” but without the high tone, without the rhetorical condiments, without the lesson slammed into the esophagus. One reads the book shaking the head at Healy’s word-play, deftness of conceptual movement, the emotional shifts, and not least his cultural commentary. Randolph Healy, like some, forgive the anagram, “holy alpha nerd”, has a “hyper-anal hold” on language, such that we enjoy where his book grips us immensely, which is not so much in the anus. A very tight grip: Randolph Healy is gripping our vulvae and scrota. Indeed, another anagram of “Randolph Healy” is “Help! A horny lad!” Also here, the family life of the poet, the Politics, the idea that Time itself can be controlled by the priesthood. nothing¬hing¬ing¬ing¬ion
The chapbook meditates upon the shifting of cultural, verbal, and temporal frames to reveal both significance and insignificance: “A mite on an abacus wished it was a fruitbat / white blank black oblivion either side of this bright day.” “A flaw in a quiz-show thought he was a kazoo / everyone is singular the entire plane shuddered prepositor or prior.” Eh!? Livid syntax gags, right? Healy’s humor happens in a hyphen, in a droll comma, as the poem moves from tight lines that jag left to right and then flare into paragraphs: sell the slow Healy is like a weed banging on a door. Subtle, insistent, goofy — but carefully formed and incontrovertibly complex. And ever sad. This book, and. Healy’s poems, and this one in particular, hold at once a mathematical precision and an easy playfulness, a humor and a gravity, that cause a kind of rip in the reader. Daylight Saving Sex: syntax hides vile gags, indeed. The book, like all Wild Honey books, can be obtained from Wild Honey Press, at 16a Ballyman Road, Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, or by sending an email to poetry@wildhoneypress.com. |
Jacket 15 — December 2001 Contents page This material is copyright © Gabriel Gudding
and Jacket magazine 2001 |