The Collection

Within (the) pages can be found an amalgamation of the author's previous chapbooks published between 1997 and 2007 – but here brought together in one hardback edition. Its manner is cryptic, its meaning veiled, as its author plays with the reader’s sight and perception, through lengths of prose, poetry and short stories, together with snapshots of sentences poised between the moments of the page, to tell scenes and vignettes of life lived and endured. There is the essence in these pages of life lived on the edge of ordinary perception; of a soul-cry calling out to the humans lost in the wilderness that is a banal society. There is suicide and pain, loss and love, and angsted (sic) questions, self-doubt and recriminations. Yet it steers a course away from the morbid rocks. The works prove uplifting; thoughtful streams of consciousness that fill one’s emotional sails. Orchis, here, is no siren wailing us onwards to shipwrecked despair. Her poetry begs... nay demands thought and reflection, it provokes an essential questioning, the perpetual sense that a revelation, if not an epiphany is just there on the tip of the tongue. There is an almost surreal quality to much of the material presented, especially in the later selections, when she presents what can be best described as verbal collages. To say surreal, however, belies the easy lucidity present on the pages. No easy reading these collages, but the effort is worth it; dense bodies of prose or poetry is surrounded by cut and pasted snippets. Short poems, scribbled observations, lines of text like a singular moment of thought frozen on the page. To read them, the book must turn this way and that. These are dense, crowded pages, begging an almost claustrophobic response as one trapped in a maelstrom crowd. Expect the morbid, but be surprised that it isn't. The words are no self-indulgent maudlin misery fest, but deep and heartfelt: **Mark Cantrell** *(Tyke in Exile/Novelist/Poet/Journalist)*