a mythopoetic compendium of luminous & shadowed visions
Jake Berry's 3 part masterwork, Brambu Drezi, is a cadenced compendium constructed by & of syncopated steps, a labor sourced from many diverse texts and influences. A modern mythopoiesis of recastings and allusions from Biblical, Native American, jazz, alchemy, blues, astrophysics and other fields and traditions ... these pages are mixed and well salted with chopped & fractured word salads, cryptic glyphs, poetic visions both luminous and shadowed ...
Brambu Drezi appears to the apprehending consciousness as a hallucinatory scrapbook freighted with pen & ink collage work; line drawings; paintings interlarded with cut-up fragments, snippets, and orphan language... this is truly "a completely open work, without boundaries" (Author's Notes).
Prosed & philosophical vignettes are married to disparate insertions from many historic, religious, mythic, musical and artistic traditions; there are nods aplenty to Holderlin, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, St. John of the Cross, Charles Olsen, the Zen and Taoist Masters as testimony to " ... an address of the holy ... continuing to arise throughout Brambu Drezi".
Geometric figures segue alongside many of Berry's discursive lines, with ganlia-like forms recurring regularly throughout the text. The large looming form of Charles Olson makes a cameo appearance, and delivers a shibbolethic epiphany. The imagery comes from someplace "where the sea refuses to wash up another crankshaft"; in the dream-sequenced tellings, one is reminded of the surreal nightscapes of Patchen's THE JOURNAL OF ALBION MOONLIGHT, perhaps lying in bed in post-coital bliss alongside the cinematic mind of David Lynch. "All night/the stillness contaminated/by thick erotic figures/is my engine/till they kick in the morning door"
Some of the geometical drawings have a Kandinskyesque appeal, while the visual poetry of indecipherable code talkings melds with techno-primitive verses drummed out in staggered cadences ... then, one arrives at a sudden seque into the Rattler Chant of the old Native culture in a petitioning of the Great Void for deliverance. The glossolalia-laden codes are the rapturous utterances of a tranced soothsayer working in hybrid techniques ... "I wait/and press my eyeballs/until visions come."
Brambu Drezi is, finally, a sequencing of the DNA of archtypal memory by way of transforming imagery. The incantations of oblique fire become the decantings of spilled images as the pages are etched with this fire. The visions have thus arrived, like the Paraclete bringing the righteous light of renewal and creative endeavor ...
Matt Hill - 6.2.2010
