This week God of Missed Connections was reviewed at Prairie Fire magazine. Here reviewer Gillian Harding-Russell discusses the title poem:
"Reminiscent of Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Dark Pines Under Water," Bachinsky's poem "God of Missed Connections" employs changing metaphors to reveal her conception of the nature of the mind and unconscious. Unlike MacEwen's poem, which creates an implicit metaphor in the landscape it describes, Bachinsky likens the mind to a alluvial plain with layers of geological markings, only to depart from this ingenious concept and find another analogy in "split obsidium," whose variant smoothness becomes an image for the mind looking back at itself."
I love MacEwen's "Dark Pines Under Water." Incantatory, iconic, chilling—I hadn't considered a debt to MacEwen before now, but it is due. Enjoy.
Dark Pines Under Water
Gwendolyn MacEwen
This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.
But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
from The Shadow Maker (1969)
Happy Thanksgiving.
