Book review:
If Shadows Could Bruise
by Anthony Mason
If Shadows Could Bruise, Anthony Mason's fifth book of poems, continues to uphold the samecaliber of thoughtfulness and unique sense of reality found in his earlier work.
Mason has always created a fine line between dreams and reality in his poetry. This new collection
of poems is no different:
I am the message carried from one streetlight to another.
I'm half present.
Abstract as if sketched into the centre of a busy scene.
Each man holding a cloud on a string.
I am a kind of urn full of eraser dust;
if I should spill I might become a picture..
A bird perhaps.
The above excerpt, taken from Mason's poem "Bottles, Bells and Botticelli Shells," demonstrates his ability to morph new ideas of imagery with a central theme. Mason enjoys sending his readers on a
journey of the absurd, blurring the lines between memory, imagination, and truth.
The next lines from Mason's poem "Paper Moon Confessions" quite sum up his work beautifully:
Now I live in a world full of bold colours
and billboards, Café houses, not ugly enough to be beautiful…
I always did live inside of my chalk drawings.
So easily smeared away in the rain, palpable as memory
and all the more meaningful, even if no one else sees it.
It was imagined. recorded somewhere, somehow re-rendered
in my dreams, or maybe just leftovers from a dream
unremembered.
The reader gets to know Mason's bold colours intimately. We get to live inside of his memories and
dreams. It's a pleasant place to be, even if for only the duration of this book.
If Shadows Could Bruise is Anthony Mason's fifth book of poetry. His other books are titled Embrace, Ephemerealms, Mirror Realms, and Dreaming Inside of Streetlights. If Shadows Could Bruise is the third book of Mason's that Up the Staircase has gladly reviewed. All of Mason's books can be found HERE. His fan page can be joined and viewed HERE. (You must be signed into your Facebook account to view)