The Journey to Kailash by Mike Allen

The Journey to Kailash is the most recent poetry collection by speculative poet Mike Allen. It contains around sixty poems, each rich and darkly beautiful. Nurtured by Allen’s fertile imagination and strong poetic skills, seeds of myth, science, and art have grown into poetry that is lovely, thought-provoking, and subtly twisted.

That is not to say that there are not elements of humor within the collection. The title poem, the 2008 long form Rhysling winner, “The Journey to Kailash,” mixes myth and mundanity, ancient beings and new, wit and gently hinted pathos, to create a truly entrancing tale.

When Ganesh marries my mother,
I am 18, my own man
in the eyes of the law; but barely a zygote
in his eyes. He calls me spermling
the first time we speak in private;
I tell him I know a doctor
who can do something about that nose.

A similar mixture of modern urban settings and mythic creatures can be found in the haunting poem, “Giving Back to the Muse.”

She wears a necklace of knives and eyes,
a sash sewn from flags and faces,
boots welded from bomb fragments,
a belt of hangman’s rope.

The ending of this poem is perfect, and very much in keeping with its title. If this is a description of one of Allen’s own muses, “Giving Back to the Muse” may even give some insight into some of his other poems.

“Retrovirus,” another of my favorites from this collection, is a much gentler poem, at least on the surface.

we lost our ethnic accents in the plague
voiceboxes locked in standard broadcast
with the occasional Bogart swagger
John Wayne drawl or Mayberry twang

A very well-written and thoroughly thought-out play on words, the poem explores the idea of a world moving back into the culture of an earlier, and perhaps simpler, time. However, “Retrovirus” also delicately shows us some of the dangers implicit in such a reversion.

Many of the poems in this collection deal with a common theme, the concept of having one’s memories, beliefs, or personality traits deliberately stolen or stripped away. As a writer…heck, even as a human being, I can think of few thefts that could scare me more. Allen’s poems “Disaster at the BrainBankTM ATM,” “The Captive Pleads with the Memory Carver,” and “The Strip Search” each very matter-of-factly address such fears, as though the ability to steal bits of one’s consciousness is commonplace and accepted in the poems’ own reality.

“The Strip Search” hit me especially hard. In grisly, visceral terms, the poem describes a horrific version of an airport security check, one that searches out contraband emotions.

They made me open mind, heart, soul, shook them out
like sacks of flour, panned the contents
for every nugget of twinkling hope, glistening courage;
applying lethal aerosol
to any motion that could be ascribed to love or will
or malingering dreams—

At the end of “The Strip Search,” I’m left wondering about the worlds that live in Mike Allen’s mind, but even more about our own world, which this group of speculative poems brings into an odd, twilight focus.

The Journey to Kailash is truly an excellent book, filled with poetry that evokes emotion even while it inspires thought. A few of the poems in this collection, along with comments from various reviewers, can be found at www.thejourneytokailash.com. Read through the website, then order a copy of the book as a whole. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Publisher: Curiosities (June 2008)
Pages: 136 pages
Hardcover price: $19.95
Hardcover ISBN: 1934648442
Paperback price: $9.95
Paperback ISBN-10: 1934648450