Distant Dreams: Science
Fiction Poems
John Light
(45 pages, stapled, card cover).
ISBN 978 1 897968 49 9
£5 from bookshops
or £3 direct (cheques payable to John Light)
In his introduction the author wrote:
I have been thrilled, enthralled, inspired by
science fiction since childhood. Part of that fascination lies in its
language. So too the appeal of poetry for me is in the language
and its special use of it. I have come to feel that poetry is the
natural language of science fiction and especially of fantasy. Perhaps
it was fantasy that drove the invention of poetry. Stories told in the
firelight of a sheltering cave at night were unwritten; they could only
be recorded in memory and the most basic tools of poetry are rhyme and
rhythm, pattern and repetition. So poetry is the preferred language
of memory storage.
In the ancient world tales of imagined worlds and
strange creatures and magical dangers were related as epic poems which
still enrich our literature.
When I write poems of science fiction and of fantasy
I want both my ideas and my language to escape the gravitational pull
of mundanity.
One of the key attractions of both science fiction
and mystery stories is unexpectedness and it is also one of the
qualities I most appreciate in humour. As my mind wanders around my
brain, from time to time it bumps into knots of verbal silliness. If
these rhyme or have rhythm they become poems of a sort and some of
those have worm-holed or quantum-tunnelled their way into previously
empty spaces in these pages.
As in the other collections in this series, the
writing spans three or four decades. The poems are not arranged in
order of composition (indeed some have continued to evolve). Instead
they follow one another according to a logic I cannot myself fathom but
which just felt intuitively apposite to me. So there may not be any
value in reading them in the order they are presented!
A poem from the book
Silent Departure
Above the limitless city
a dark ship drifts
across the orange sky
set on a slow diagonal
pointing always
towards infinity.
(Page amended 22 July 2017)
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contents of this site are copyright © John Light.
