Tenebrae in Aeturnum (A Collection of Stygian Verse) by Benjamin Blake, pub. Hippocampus Press, Nov. 2020.
5/5 stars
Benjamin Blake is a new – to me – poet. As someone who has been delving more and more into the world of dark poetry, it’s been a treat to discover a poet who will most certainly draw me back to his work in the future. From the start, he comes up with lines that just make you stop and read them again. I mean the line ‘The nightingale has stopped singing’, evokes so much, a doom-laden phrase that serves as a warning for what is to come. There follows a collection that completely lives up to this expectation of dread. Throughout, Blake uses imagery of death and despair; walls bleed and bodies burn alongside poems of suicides and war, sex, and abuse. The horrors of humanity are laid bare in expressions of beautiful darkness.
The textured and nuanced lines made me stop again and again to repeat them. I am someone who can almost ‘taste’ words and when I come across the right combination it is as if I am eating something solid. For me this collection is a veritable feast – my umami. From that first line to ‘A Sunken Star’ – ‘Some people are nothing but tombs/Filled with dried flesh and dust/And locked from the inside to Elderflower – ‘There are worse things than being alone/And the laughter’s turned to screams’, to A City, a Tomb – ‘What can one do/When they realise that the place they wish to escape from/Is actually where they belong?’, Blake delivers pearls and believe me, there are many more within the pages.
The shadow world of Blake’s poetry is a dark one but one which demands you cross his borders again and again.
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