Songs of the Underland by Kurt Newton

“Kurt Newton’s collection of speculative poetry, Songs of the Underland, is an achievement both innovative and reminiscent—and yes, I believe both of those can be and have been attained in this impressive tome. Beyond the themes, topics, and content of the poems in the collection, Newton’s use of what I will call “Free Formalism” is both innovatively creative and distinctive.

The first half of the poems in this collection, as promised in the title, refer to, indeed many are set in, The Underland. As Newton explains in his prefatory material, it is a place defined in the first of two foundational poems:

It is a place where nightmares dwell,
where untethered shadows live and breathe,
beneath the pavement of reality lies
a hellish world that one should never hope to see.

As he further notes, the Underland is, “a nether world of nightmare and shadow where a kind of spiritual penance is meted out.” This he further specifies by adding that it is a “cautionary tale” that depicts a zone resulting from the condition in which the spiritual has been superseded by the material.
And to call it a “tale” is key to the understanding of the first section of the poems. It may seem a stretch to say this, but I was reminded of the “lad’s journey” in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Just as with Housman’s semi-autobiographical journey tracing “the lad” from the home vistas of the rural shire to the great city of London, recounting the trials, tribulations, traumas, and discoveries in that rite de passage along the way, so too does Newton’s journey of the soul chronicle and caution against the results of following ill-chosen forks in that journey’s long road. In the establishing early poem, “The Underland,” he writes:

I cannot stress enough the wisdom I’ve derived,the consequence of each and every choice one makes,the lesson not to tread where hatred dwells,not to wallow in the pointless pain of past mistakes,
or one will find oneself alone in a living hell.

 The second half of the book, a section entitled Other Macabre Machinations, offers the more conventional collection—at least “conventional” for the contemporary speculative poet of the weird, horrific, and supernatural—of a variety of poems that range from poems on supernatural entities (doppelganger, fetch, the British figure of Redcap) to horrific images as with the visions of “Bone Riders” and “The Black Star Traveling Show.” One masterful sequence of two poems, “The Crows of Las Cruces” and “The Crows of Las Cruces Revisited,” strikes as a strange seeming blend of Hitchcock’s The Birds and the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Newton also weaves in some homages to Poe acknowledging that master’s influence upon his own work and a couple poems that give a nod to Lovecraft’s mythos. Meanwhile, this second half of the book goes far toward establishing a “mythos” of Newton’s own.

Kurt Newton’s poems are formally distinguished as well. He uses a variety of line lengths and metrical variations, and, while fully rhyming on many occasions, the rhymes are sometimes randomly placed, sometimes even carrying over from one stanza to another. Quite often, they are examples of assonance rather than full rhyme: the echoing of vowel sounds in ultimate words of lines rather than exact repetition of vowel and final consonant. He also makes use of other phonic tropes: alliteration, consonance, and echoes of similar sounds (proximity of both voiced and unvoiced versions of our phonemes). All in all, Kurt Newton has a finely developed sense of poetic rhythm and sound.

The text is embellished with many graphics, several reminiscent of the types of page enhancements of classic pulps such as Weird Tales—into the pages of which Newton’s work would nicely fit.

This is an important collection and well worth the purchase and perusal of a fine poet’s work. Newton is at the forefront of the speculative poets of our time.