Moons and Mirrors

Laurence Steven is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
the author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction.

Moons and Mirrors contains 77 poems and prose-poems drawn from
Bullock’s oeuvre of 30-something books “in which the moon is the
primary theme, or at least an essential and characteristic image.” For
Bullock, the moon is a mirror in which “we see our dreams.”
Consequently, “[a]ny poems about [the] moon can only be in the nature
of dreams.” The effect on the poetry is that we get dream-image after
dream-image; nothing is tangible; all is shifting, iridescent,
refulgent, hazy, cloudy. And the images are repeated because, Bullock
reminds us, “in their innermost being all people are much the same,
the moon unites us by bringing to light our common ground.” Now this
might be fine if Bullock either had dreamt dreams expansive enough to
provide sufficient variety over 103 pages, or had cut the book to about
40 tight, well-edited pages. But he did neither, and I’m afraid the
dream does not carry the reader through.