Songs from the Black Moon

Songs from the Black Moon by Rasu-Yong Tugen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm an existentialist, at heart, but not an earnest nihilist. While I do enjoy staring into the abyss from time to time, I don't dangle my feet over the edge for too long.

When I bought Songs from the Black Moon, I expected something dark and brooding. But I should have known from Ligotti's endorsement ("A book of beautiful and strangely tranquil outbursts of disaffection and dissolution. I wish everyone on earth lived by the sentiments expressed within it." (note the absence of exclamation points)) that this work is just a little too hopeless for me.

That's not to say there isn't beauty in this book. Ligotti is correct on that point. Whether it is in longer stretches of prose poetry:

I remain open to all the songs of abrogation that seem to course through my brain in the tear-laden sleep of cognition. You remain open and remain more open, infinitely open - even, and especially, open to what I most fear. You remain open to the seraphic and invertebrate dusk, to what could be or should have been, to our hermetic and deep mauve moonstone sleep. In myriad dimensions tarnished chromatic pieces of bark and branch and lichen fall upon your slender fingers and wrists and your reverberant and tranquil black hair.

Or in some of the "outbursts":

Across your tranquil, tenebrous forehead pass apparitions retrieved from the dimly-lit dusts of oblivion.

the Baroness de Tristeombre's words are resplendent.

And, yet, they are often too self-aware, in the way that poetry shouldn't be. I'll with-hold examples here, but there are many times when the works are full of blatant gothic posturing, odes to depression for the sake of depression, devoid even of a sense of rebellious energy. Just a big bag of giving up.

And I'm not about that. Here we have some diamond flakes among just too much coal. I would have liked things, if not shinier, at least a tiny bit less enthusiastic about an utter lack of enthusiasm.

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