In the Yaddith Time by Ann K. Schwader

Speculative poet Ann K. Schwader’s collection, In the Yaddith Time, is an ambitious thirty–six sonnet sequence inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s famous sonnet cycle, Fungi from Yuggoth (coll. 1941). Schwader, an exceptionally talented poet, is able to tell her story in naturally rhythmic conversational verse that builds in intensity, pulling the reader across the galaxy via the Lovecraftian Cosmos, megalomania, madness, and a great deal of slime. She begins,

Beyond the pallid sparks of wholesome space,
lost Yaddith drifts forever in her void
of primal nightmare, temple to a race
whose lightest thoughts might leave a world destroyed.

Thus the crew of a spaceship lands on Mars and finds hidden cave crystals that, when disturbed by the crew’s emotionally unbalanced captain, wake the last vestiges of a lost, immensely powerful elder race, the Mi-go, who have the apparently effortless ability to kill or drive mere humans mad. What follows is a first person narrative describing the emotional fragmentation and demise of the entire crew, all except the narrator, a relatively inexperienced young woman—Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians seen through a Lovecraftian lens. Instead of Lovecraft’s book of arcane esoteric knowledge, it is a space transporter gate with “twisted yellow metal holding rough-/cut stones in latticework of alien make” that opens the way to Yuggoth. The next line, “This was our first—& mankind’s last—mistake.” implies that not just the crew but all of humanity will eventually be doomed. The Mi-go, blobbish crustacean-like creatures with the power to detach heads and hold brains in cylinders that can be attached to devices allowing the brains to continue to function, lure humans with promises of knowledge, “the lore of deep Na’morha’s ageless heart,” but in typically Lovecraftian style, this proves too much for any sane person to handle.

In the Yaddith Time represents a small part of the genre that assumes that humans cannot face the chaotic alien or the empty vastness of space without deteriorating into depression, dysfunctionality, and eventually, death. Schwader describes this as “That fragile candle called the mortal mind.” As in Swedish Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson’s novel-length poem, Aniara, (1956) whose 103 cantos relate the tragedy of a spaceship that is swept out of the solar system after originally being bound for Mars with a cargo of colonists from war-ravaged Earth, Schwader’s narrator observes the dissolution of her remnant fellow crewmembers into capering “parodies of men/ who sang & piped & wept … then sang again,” but remains rational despite keeping “a weapon close at hand” and “burning every light / around the clock” Sleeplessness, however, begins to take its toll on her in a way that Schwader elegantly describes as “dragging my ravaged consciousness past night’s event horizon,” late twentieth century science used to create an image that likely would have been as alien to Lovecraft as anything in his Ghooric Zone is to his readers.

Lovecraft’s father, a traveling salesman, went mad when H.P was two, probably from syphilis. It is no wonder that for H.P., life often did not make sense, and human sanity was a fragile fabric easily rent. Most of his work was published in the years immediately following World War I, a time of international disillusionment. Martinson’s Aniara was deeply influenced by World War II and the cold war that followed. It is not surprising then that In the Yaddith Time comes at a time when we are engaged in another war where human life is routinely wasted—and most often for incomprehensible reasons, this time an unholy mix of politics, religion, and oil revenues. As in all literature, whether space opera or horror fantasy, the backstory is really us, our lives on this generation ship called Earth. Schwader concludes:

In feeble death flare flickers & falls dark,
devoured by a thousand nameless powers
rupturing space-time to resume their sway.
The destiny of Man is to give way.

Here the words “rupturing space-time” recall nuclear holocaust. While the sanest of us might wonder why the world can’t hold a cribbage tournament or a potluck supper instead of a war, Schwader’s poems remind us that twenty-first century humans have learned little. We still hover precariously on the edge of total human annihilation. Thus, In the Yaddith Time becomes a cautionary tale.

Publisher: Mythos Books (April 2007); introduction by Richard L. Tierney, illustrations by Steve Lines.
Price: $8.00
Paperback: 54 pages
ISBN: 097899115X