My face turned from the side streets, and with the last of the light smoldering down across the detritus of that scene, I prepared and became the change to evening. “Either way,” I thought, “relinquish yourself to eternity, or flee into the falseness that lay ahead.” And when I happened to slide down into those tubs of yellow-gray light the continuing symptoms of the womb-of-mind sleep that by birth had already been denied me began to surge, to circle and ensnare, to pull at my unknowing that lay somewhere beneath my skin, urging me to squeeze my whole self into tiny holes poked through the most worn out parts of my anus and knees, hoping I’d spray out onto the pavement or at least dribble off into the street. The hazy illuminations sank dusk into the ground the way pins and roofing nails tack bedsheets to crackhouse windows. The aesthetic crimes of neon-signs and halogen beamed their bath-confessionals from the vacant sides of liquor store lots, gas stations, and, farther up in the distance, the sky-world of highway crossbridges, off-ramp dining holes, and worn out truckstops. That sounds quite decadent, don’t you think? If I had checked I would’ve learned that I was in fact early. It was poetry, really, that brought me from the ruthless perturbations of that which emerges and that which fades to the orchestral mystery of the inner globules and the outer worlds, revealing, within all that screaming, the order beneath it.ĭown on the earth, on some world Avenue, I was late for an obligation. Though this pained me, I slowly learned to spend myself with the currency of their silences. Instead, there were these endless symphonies composed only of sirens that surrounded me from all around. (Excerpt taken from Part One of An Dantomine Eerly)įROM THE EARLIEST TIME I wanted to push my whole face deep into my eyes and sleep eternally in the womb of my mind, images of our world fading from sight and memory.

The result is a stylized exploration of the infinite world through the microscope of Middleton’s ill-fated narrator, and above all, one promising debut. The impact of her death afflicts Dallin in ways he cannot comprehend and spirals him into his meeting with the mythic celestial escort, An Dantomine Eerly.Īn Dantomine Eerly is fine experimental writing, using narrative techniques, dream-world symbolism, and a poetic style of prose that takes up John Banville’s admittance “to blend poetry and fiction into some new form.” The novel itself is a re-conception of the 17th century Irish poetic form of the aisling, meaning “dream vision” or “vision poem.” As Dallin confronts the moment of death, the book assembles itself as a collage of the affinities, false-hoods, and absurdities of our memory and our reality. The ailed poet and his beautifully haunting wife Aìsling flee an obscure political persecution that culminates in her planned murder.

An absence in a wind-beaten house suggests a past but somehow still-looming tragedy vacancy fills a ghostly barroom and the campus of a condemned university city streets and desolated forests are populated by no one except the formulations of Dallin’s own mind. As the Irish-American poet Dallin lays dying, he recalls the surreal geography and traumatic events that lead him to the end.

The broom of the system