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Xibalba Songs
From cosmogonies and half-remembered memories, to mythical mandalas from the ancient past, this collection of surreal and unsettling poetry charts the soul's journey from daylight into the dark recesses of Xibalba, the Realm of the Dead and the Archetypal. But in doing so, it also mirrors the death of mythical and non-rational modes of experience in our modern society: the grey emptiness of Xibalba is experienced here as a bleak realm whose mythological heart is steadily disppearing to be replaced by muted whispers on the archetypal breeze. The house of torment in Orpheus Junior is the rationalising but dehumanised urban space, yet there are signs of hope: flashes of life remind us that we a...
Nine Nights Awake
A nameless young man finds himself wandering half-naked through the frozen wintry Bristol night, when he falls – or is he pushed…? – into the river and is washed out to sea. Arriving lost and exhausted upon a strange island enmisted, he comes to a fortress which holds a lithe, enchanted-but-broken, eternal youth in chains, who tries to kill him. It is only through sharing stories of his life that he is able to avert the youth's wrath at being disturbed, easing his traumatised heart by offering him something no other visitor to this dark place has ever given him: presence, and care. This unearthly mythical narrative becomes the poetic frame story by which Bruce, the nameless wanderer, u...
White Book
White Book is a strange and beautiful visionary and mystical text: “Could I not be a Quiet Man? / Could I not be a Speaker of these Words? / Laughing, crying, I hear these Words / I hear the answer: The time is now / It is always now / And when I knew this truly / To the depth of my soul / I became human / And I took of the vision / The Vision of the New Year...” This sparse but beautiful volume is the fifth in the new Xibalba Books Poetry Series aimed at republishing selected highlights from Bruce's vast poetry archive.
Elegies And Dirty Truths
A dark, brutally honest, and sometimes sordid voyage, written with a wired, savage voice, into the promiscuous heart of a gay/Queer and hyperactive/ADHD outsider who has internalised a world of pain, but still finds himself, standing, still surviving... "don’t freak if this all goes horribly wrong: it’s fine…" Trigger warnings run their gauntlets everywhere, but there are moments of beauty and sorrow, which is beauty in another guise... "don’t see my eagerness, my tears, or if my eyes blank: it’s fine…" Not for the faint-hearted perhaps, this collection jumps frenetically from elegiac tributes for queer heroes to self-destructive sexual acts in a kind of shadowy no-place and no-time, confronting casual encounters, abuse and queerphobic hate towards a poetic self attempting to act as an antenna for Queer suffering everywhere... "don’t stop: I’ll be your willing sacrifice…"
The Fernal Songs
What would a positive, life-affirming, cosmos-embracing and transcendent Queer mythology look like? In the years 2013-15, artist and poet Bruce Rimell got a chance to find out when he was invited to participate in a collaborative project to create an international art publication, ‘The Encyclopaedia of Fernal Affairs’. Although this was principally an art-oriented initiative, Bruce quickly went off on his own tangent, inventing a complete constructed language and two song-cycles of fernal mythology which resonated with his own burgeoning sense of his Queer identity. ‘The Fernal Songs’ are the shimmering results of that literary side project. Centred around Lucaion, a Queer Hero whose...
Eleusis
A visionary and artistic exploration through the greatest of the Mystery traditions of Antiquity, 'Eleusis' follows the winding path that leads from the kidnap of Persephone and Demeter's grief at her loss to the transformation of mankind through the Epiphany of an Ineffable Female Godhead. Drawing from several years of mythological, experiential and visionary research, and delightfully enfolded with 25 colour and monochrome art images, Bruce attempts to move beyond the Eleusinian veil of secrecy to enter into the very Heart of the Mystery. A final illustrated essay also explores the meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries for the modern day.
Bloodhoney Songs
Iceland is often labelled ‘a land of ice and fire’ – these days it has become something of a cliché – but when artist and poet Bruce Rimell visited with his husband in 2023, he felt plunged into a world of blood and honey, a place of poetry and song, recalling the Old Norse mythic images, as well as the magma which underlies and sculpts the vistas of this volcanic country… “to which I will say: I am a poet, I pray to waterfalls, let it outpour like rain…” Simultaneously a journey through Iceland’s natural, cultural and human landscapes, as well as a dreaming fall into the frenetic soul of a hyperactive poet, ‘Bloodhoney Songs’ takes in scenes from Reykjavik, ekphrastic...
Minver Stories
Playful, archaic and confusing, this bizarre collection of song-chant poems narrates in a riddling language the story of Minver, a flashing-eyed sprite who became for the author the very embodiment of ecstasy. Emerging from the dance club culture of the late 90s, but set in an archetypal nameless mythical landscape, Minver Stories is a very idiosyncratic take on the MDMA experience. “is there no word in my language, a box of papers, leaves in the air, to tell me who you are? I can see you but I do not yet know who you are...” Indefinable trickster, strange and fantastic sprite, Minver leaps from these pages into caves, rivers and forests, meets a cast of mythical characters (who mostly become victims of his irascible ecstatic playtime) and dances with flowing words and oblique references into the heart and into the soul. “a leaf, an angel wing, you will see soon enough...”
Echoes For Aphrodite
Artist and poet Bruce Rimell brings another strange and colourful poetic travelogue, springing from eight inspiring days and nights on the Greek island of Milos in the Cyclades… "everything is touched by fingers of gales, all’s in motion: sea, air, land shivers" …walking through a volcanic terrain buffeted by strong winds from the tail end of an Aegean storm, with his perception transformed by calls for the return of the world famous ‘Venus de Milo’ – more properly ‘Aphrodite of Milos’ – back to her home island, the sight of her in the mountains… "hey Paris…! Aphrodite wants to go home" …as if Aphrodite herself was whispering in the breezes, her truest melody, feeling her way into the poet’s heart, his words, his dreams… "I’ve been hearing her voice, the one who smiles, who persuades into the human heart, and mine so easily opened, so swayed by heaven on earth, and shadows" …these verse notes are echoes, fragments of a song, as much from Aphrodite as for her, as well as an elegy to a unique and stunning island landscape… "ask how and why all day and all night upon the Melian isle…"
Beeley Far The North
In summer 2022, poet and artist Bruce Rimell visited the Coasts of Antrim, Northern Ireland. After a lifetime reading Irish mythology, and wandering that ancient landscape in his mind for years, this was the first time he had set foot on the physical island itself. Unsurprisingly, his imagination caught fire, and ‘Beeley far The North’ is the result. Framed as a picaresque jaunt around the region of Ballycastle, taking in notable legends and landmarks from around the town as well as Rathlin Island, this eccentric narrative poem takes as its primary inspiration the Middle Irish tale ‘Buile Suibhne’, or, in Seamus Heaney’s translation ‘Sweeney Astray’. Rather than retell this tra...
