A.H. Ferguson
Review by Alyce Wilson
The poems in From Mourning Till Midnight clearly come from a very dark place in the poet's life, written about a struggle with schizophrenia.
Typical of the work in this book are these lines from "inharmonious clamor":
there is an inharmonious clamor
arising from the abyss of aberration
with eerie specters haunting my mind
i am absorbed by dread dementia
as it pours from the cataclysmic decanter
of the psyche
Just like the fog of schizophrenia, the poems swirl around inexact abstracts, bogging the reader down with overwrought language and hyperbole.
Remarkably enough, A.H. Ferguson provides a prescription for the cure to this abstraction, in the poem "in warm tones":
speak to me in warm tones
let me into your world
if you cannot come willingly
into mine
That is precisely what Ferguson needs to do: let the reader into the poem by clarifying the abstractions, by using precise details and imagery which would allow a reader to understand what it's really like to fight this condition.
Then, these poems could transform from a private forum for catharsis and healing to a chance for public understanding of a complicated disease.
Self-published by A.H. Ferguson