Labyrinths: Poems from Five Cities

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Michael Bullock’s surrealist/imagist poetry has won awards in North
America, Europe, and Hong Kong. His recently published Walled Garden has
been nominated for this year’s B.C. Book Award. Bullock has been the
subject of a critical work, The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of
Michael Bullock, issued to celebrate half a century of creative work.

The more than 50 short poems contained in Labyrinths are arranged in
five sections, each under the name of a city: Albufeira (a fishing
village in Portugal), London, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Tokyo. Bullock
says in a brief foreword that “the title Labyrinths refers as much to
the complexities of poetic composition as to the topographical
intricacies of these or any other cities.” He adds, however, that some
of the poems, particularly those written in London and Vancouver,
“spring directly from the environment—especially in the case of
Vancouver— whereas others could ostensibly have been written anywhere,
though this is probably an illusion that underestimates the spirit of
place.” The poems all display Bullock’s intensely personal way of
viewing nature: an amalgam of conscious/subconscious images in which
radical transmutations occur among the animate and inanimate. One of the
best-realized poems, “Hand and Flower,” exhibits the poet’s skills
with assonance and end rhyme: “The hand that holds the flower is
ghostly white / as though from long years in a dark tomb / the tulip
glows with a spectral light / crimson as though torn from a gaping
womb.”

Bullock’s poetry deserves a wider audience than it has thus far
received. This short volume provides a fine introduction to the
writer’s unusual talents.