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maenad_wordsmith's review against another edition
5.0
This book is marvelous. The form of the abecedarians works beautifully with the content: crafting magic. Yeats' idea that "magic was not so much a kind of poetry, as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness” is illustrated in this collection.
Formal poetry and divination, for instance, both use readings of visual patterns. Like the suits and numbers in tarot, Kriesel's alphabetical form is on the tactile page. One almost needs to see or feel the pattern--it's not a poetry that shows all its tricks when read aloud.
I'm, of course, partial to Michael's poetry; he was one of the contributors to the tarot poetry anthology that I edited. And the logo that I used for that book (and got a tattoo of) is part of an English Renaissance art piece called "The Screene of Fortune" which incorporates the 17th century bibliographic alphabet (blackletter, gothic bookhand font) in a circle.
Formal poetry and divination, for instance, both use readings of visual patterns. Like the suits and numbers in tarot, Kriesel's alphabetical form is on the tactile page. One almost needs to see or feel the pattern--it's not a poetry that shows all its tricks when read aloud.
I'm, of course, partial to Michael's poetry; he was one of the contributors to the tarot poetry anthology that I edited. And the logo that I used for that book (and got a tattoo of) is part of an English Renaissance art piece called "The Screene of Fortune" which incorporates the 17th century bibliographic alphabet (blackletter, gothic bookhand font) in a circle.
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