What needs has life created in your being? How have you perceived love, faith, the mysteries of other beings, and change? How has that shaped who and what you are now and are becoming?

Stephen Charles Long isn't afraid to put into poetic form the darkness that relationships and experience have created in his life as in "Life Among the Dead, "...Nothing behind/nothing ahead./Tired of trying to find/life among the dead." At the same time, he is willing to explore love and connection, as in "Life is Good." For he has captured the mystical reality that darkness and light, ugliness and beauty, are each part of the fabric of existence shaping our past, present and future.

Some poems are startlingly and uniquely put, as in "Pyrexia, in which the poet realizes "...In anger I saw/the demise of truth./Only lies remain/nothing else comes forth."

Whether acknowledging needs (a word frequently used in this collection of poems) or the spirit of exploration, Long continues to embrace the lack of control in becoming and the letting go that enables him to say, "Let's try something new/a new path with you."

Fascinating!

Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on May 12, 2007

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