The Sorcerer with Deadly Nightshade Eyes

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of English at the University of Prince
Edward Island.

The most succinct summary of Michael Bullock’s poetic vision might be
a line from Shakespeare: “the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy
rolling.” Certainly, the fecundity of his creative writing (which he
also teaches) seems endless. This book of poems in verse and prose is
listed as his 17th. The opening “Phantasmagoria” sets the stage for
what follows, a series of extempore effusions on figures (including the
Sorcerer), fantasies, objects, thoughts, and dreams. Particularly
fascinating to the poet are flowers—their shape, scent, color, and
symbolic transience. His poems about roses have a haunting beauty. But
there is also in this book an array of darker moods: menace, despair,
regret, fear, and self-destructiveness. All are poetic in an
astonishingly variegated cascade of metaphors, always Bullock’s forte.

The book’s cover illustration, by Bullock himself, is pleasingly
eyecatching, but one has mixed feelings about his templates. They lose
much by being in black and white only; but even so, they do reinforce
one’s continued awareness of “the skull beneath the skin.” For
this reviewer, one or two also recall the horror of the snakepit in the
Scandinavian Ragnarr’s saga.