Review of The Moulding of Seers by Petra Whiteley (Shadow Archer Press)

Petra Whiteley with her new work redefines and challenges the remnants of the statuesque Gothic poetry. The latter developed as one of the opposite voices about what was at stake during the Enlightenment, by that time it surely expressed the ontological implementations of a dying metaphysical belief, reinforcing a hidden optimism about human nature.

The starting point of Whiteley’s chapbook is found in the total collapse of humanism during the WWII and how the modern Western society has developed since.

The rise and fall of individuals through normalization is one of the aspects examined in her book. The other aspect consists of the existentialist parameters as developed through A.Camus’s philosophical books and S. Plath’s poems mostly, but not exclusively. A new genre of poetry is created by using the old Gothic themes and combining them with a fresh approach. It can be said to be the post-Gothic existentialism.

An example of this comes from her poem “Witch Burning”

Freedom is the corpse between

the sharpness

of rain and the maudlin measure

of melancholy and faith.

“The Moulding of Seers” creates a new mythological ground for the being, by providing the aspects of existence and indirectly forcing the reader to take a stance of high order, making the individual solely responsible for the terms of life, again with Whiteley’s words from “Surrender”

 
  
In the void, I
  
            watch a procession of mutilated martyrs
  
                          mouthing      powerlessness,
  
                                     sabotage,
  
                               suicide sermons.
  
 

If there is something within her work that can be described as “dark”, it is the lack of any religious based mentality concerning promises and solutions very common into the post- modern easiness. Her poetry directly opposes the almost fanatical pursuit of an empty beauty, in the areas of love, of passion, of poetry and the stereotypically deified notion of happiness. In her poem “The Spectacle” she writes

  
             From this terrible rebirth,
  
all we'll have are fire-readings and stigmata
  
of miasmic teeth and love, that love.
  
 

From antiquity a seer was thought to be an individual whose thoughts and often enigmatic words were about to reshape and redirect the stasis of human beings. Whiteley’s work serves this long forgotten purpose of Art, and stands as a distant lighthouse, as a companion for bold voyagers, unwilling to settle down in preconceived comforts.

---

Ray Dunkle was born in 1972. He hates bios and to talk in first and third person about himself. He also thinks that "men are as the time is".