Title: Copacabana at Midnight
Author: Brian Ray Brewer
Publisher: GoldTouch Press, LLC
ISBN: 1956803440
Pages: 260
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
The sea has offered up many treasures, not the least of which have been dazzling and forever memorable helpings of legend, lore, language, and myth. Whose childhood has not been lovably freighted with stories of buccaneers, pirates, with the swarthy tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Nordhoff?
Poems are dreams. Like dreams, poems compress experience and make it prismatic. Different perspectives yield different worlds. Poems are kaleidoscopes. The poems of Brian Ray Brewer are no exception. Brewer is an adept in the mystical school of language. A single word or phrase of his can simultaneously illumine, darken, and flood his reader with metaphorical intent.
Why is the mariner’s plight so amenable to lyric and song? How is it that generation after generation of readers take Captain Ahab and the roiling of the whale leviathan to heart? Easy: the sea turns men and women into heroes. We are at our gutsy best when thrown back upon our own courage (as writers and survivors) by the tempests and whims of nature.
Brewer, an able poet and storyteller (the book’s last third contains a handful of fascinating recondite stories), was in his time a merchant seaman. He travelled the world, sighting foreign shores, silky snaking strands, tropical climes…and endured many nights and days alone as well. The poems in Copacabana at Midnight resurrect and transform this experience into heady storm-tossed stuff.
The voice informing these verses is wry, intelligent – always a keen commentary on nature and on man’s place in it. Ocean and seafaring are metaphors for life itself. Brewer practices a marvelous syncretism, where sea life and flora dance, drift, and meld into one another. In one story, a woman gives birth to wolves. In others, prostitutes and magic spells and wizened rummies hold court.
Readers will recognize several abiding spirits – beneficent guardian angels – informing these poems: Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Algernon Swinburne, Charles Baudelaire, even William Blake. Brewer actually mentions Poe and Blake in several places. Brewer’s intense experiences of longing and love are rendered with equal measures of pain and panache. These gems, balanced by the book’s story collection, are accessible, contemporary, never abstruse; many rhyme.
Those fond of poetry and fables will cherish this book; those new to poetry will find it a Jacob’s ladder to Parnassus. Readers will heartily welcome the cruise to strange ports of call, from Borneo to Brazil and many points in between.
