Ultima Thule book review

Jimmy Semtex is an amazing and inventive author. This collection of poems and prose poems are startlingly vivid, being full of splintered concepts that cut like shards of broken glass! Once you begin to read, going on to the next piece is almost compulsive, if not addictive because of the mental shock that stimulates the brain like a drug. Somehow I felt I was in a kind of modern TS Eliot Wasteland where western civilization is in a state of dissolution with disintegrating values, and with sharp clarity the author sees through all the posturing hypocritical bureaucracy of governments and institutions. It is a vision of civilization that has lost its way, where a child disappears, evaporates, never to be seen again, but poignantly mourned on three occasions – the anniversary of her disappearance, on her birthday and at Christmas (inevitably one thinks of Madeleine McCann). It is a world where the hive mentality rules and dictates the rules, where (as in the piece titled ‘Metal’), ‘you’re allowed to be creative under our rules’.

We are lost in this disoriented world, but maintain our sanity through these fragments of sharp insights. Dreams of youth seem to be gone and irretrievable (‘Never be 17 again’) – and gone too is the vitality that informed those wild years of our youth. But there are memorable and happy moments too. The piece titled ‘Happy Moment’ is startling in its honest frankness and crystal sharp memory of a perceived illicit intimacy, where the writer projects himself into the mind of the lover with each short sentence recording the moment, searing it in the memory, ‘Erotic video camera in our hands.’ This is high tension prose stripped of all pretence and false modesty. Another genuinely happy memory is of the protagonist’s early visit to the Lake District, another compilation of vivid impressions. The piece is a compact, concise prose poem of early memories in sharp focus, the mountains, the lakes, a jet aircraft screaming by. It is not the Lake District of Wordsworth with daffodils and babbling brooks, but a pastiche of the 20th-century mind that conjures up the fresh startling impressions of a young boy. There are also prose pieces about aircraft – a favourite of mine is the one titled Focke-Wulf Fw Steiglitz – a Nazi pilot training machine ‘that looked as smart as any evil SS officer in his uniform’. Even such glimpses are not your conventional descriptions and express the gutsy admiration of an honest observer.

The writer holds no punches, either, when it comes to politics – and it is refreshing to find a writer that has the courage to say it as it is!

This is a collection of very gritty, astonishing poems and prose pieces that will keep you reading and rethinking about your perception of the world!http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ultima-Thule-Jimmy-Boom-Semtex-ebook/dp/B00SHVP7I4