A review of On the Road to Infinity by Mark Logie

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

On the Road to Infinity
by Mark Logie
25 pages, Oct 2011

Reading poetry isn’t always an easy process. Sometimes poems can take the reader to dark, deep, and even dank places as they draw the reader inward. Mark Logie’s poems plumb the depths of human pain, the loss of innocence, a child abandoned, the terrible freedom of adulthood, the inhumanity of the daily grind, the impact of genetic engineering, and a post apocalyptic landscape.

The thirteen poems in this chapbook cover a range of themes, working between personal turmoil and political issues. The book works between a number of dichotomies: sickness and health, sanity and insanity, youth and age, city and wilderness:

Drinking in the bitter-sweet rain

of kerosene

From the titanium leviathans

overhead,

All nightmares of the wilderness

erased.

This collection of thirteen poems explores the pain, joy, fears and hopes of people living their lives (sometimes mundane, sometimes extraordinary), fighting the world, fighting themselves, or simply trying to survive against the odds.

At time Logie stretches metaphor to its limits, inviting the reader to take a dive into madness, into transformation, into escape:

I am a kestrel flying across the

borderlands,

From Instades to Outstades,

Towards the open territories of

the Great Void

At times, this takes the work into ‘purple’ territory, going just a bit far into the metaphor; using language so wrought that it become unsubtle:

The grotesque creatures who

haunt the bowels of the camp

Will pursue me into the antelight

And torture my anguished cries

until the darkfall of eternity.

Overall though, this is a powerful, often self-referential collection that covers the broad spectrum of human experience, from the simple pleasure of a farmer on Christmas morning, to the drug fuelled hallucinations of a solitary man. The deeply complex poems are image rich, and repay multiple readings.