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New Wine and Black Men’s Feet by Keith Antar Mason

Well there’s a clue in the title, as to what awaits the reader in this extraordinary genre-defiant, timeline-liberated symphony of four parts that begins as an address to god, then a love-song to the domestic, loops back to the blood-crazed Greeks, gathering and building all the while to the inexorable drumbeat of war.  Read it and be swept along by the sheer bravura and virtuoso language, coded, tough, syncopated, soft and loud.  Read it and trip back and forth to the encyclopaedia to check the references, ancient and contemporary.  Read it again and catch more of what you missed first time.  This is rich, clever, layered stuff, infinitely more crafted than it first appears.  It’s wonderfully adventurous and sustaining.  You could keep this by your bed for a very long time and not tire of it.

Book I reads as brief thoughts out loud, ‘Things to do on a Sunday…’  Place names, habits and repetition bring us in close, holding us carefully in the strain of melancholy running through.  Something hesitant, wondering, questioning; a search for God, ending in a humble and elegiac prayer. 

Book II (the longest) starts small and quiet - a soft footfall through the wonders of love and contentment that already holds the seeds of its own destruction.  The language invites us to stay awhile as if to postpone the gradual encroachment of the outside world.  Unforgettable images stalk the pages: ‘… I want the smallest room to keep my heart in where you told me to live if I wanted to be with you.’  And ‘… you draw me posing

just me naked reading the Bible…’    It’s the heady mix of the

sacred and the profane that characterises new love, new passion, soon disturbed by memory and world events slammed down like dirty plates that just keep on coming.  In amongst the sharp images and shouts, there’s a sadness and a drift that take us into Book III, into the bloody treachery involving Memnon, Achilles, Cassandra and Apollo.  The Greeks and the Trojans, the war to start all wars, documented by a blind storyteller who didn’t know the half of it.  ‘…like Katrina blew New Orleans…’ Memnon is blown through to a Mississippi delta night, glimpsed by Lorca and heard by Ntozake. 

Book IV is stripped down, the words are sounded as harsh atonal notes insisting on the interconnectedness of all actions that violate and harm.  Doomed like the ancient Greeks to endlessly re-enact violence upon each other, this last book is a song of war.  It’s a lament for the pain and loss and brutality of killing, and even more so a requiem for the lessons not-learned.  And the surprises continue.  My favourite rhyme in the book, ‘… be warned America I am a child of Medusa a subliminal seducer’ is the cue for an extraordinary passage in which real-time sex is woven through to a gathering, pungent climax that somehow rescues, reduces and redeems.  Is this the cure?

Reviewer Melanie Harris.

Melanie is a UK based theatre director. www.crosslabproductions.com

Publisher: Red Hen Press; 1 edition (November 1, 2009)  ISBN-10: 1597090921