“There's a brilliance in the mind of the poet whose imagination created this gem of a poem out of the "crumpled calendar of chaos," aptly called the "Lost Horoscope."
I was hypnotically immersed in the structure of steps that each stanza offered, hurling the reader down into memory, into the "wingless realm of illogical proclamations" and the resultant "wasteful heap of despair," while seeking "solace, sleep, and salvation" to arrive at the epiphany that "perhaps all those prophesies were true."
Like an Eliot poem, to gain the enlightenment inherent in this poem, you must read the poem again to capture the nuance and metaphysics of the allusions connecting each image, each stanza, to recover the revelatory "medley of omens" leading to the abyss of "imminent doom."
One must journey, "sight fractured," through the "moldy world of rickety realities" --typhoid, covid-- while "humming the prayers, drenched in the Monsoon showers of the Himalayan valleys rolling in the world of spirits and sages." Like the poet, one must risk the life of his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago...
a magnificent sight-healing journey.”
James Ragan has published 10 books of poetry and
is translated into 15 languages with poems in Poetry, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today and
30 anthologies. Plays produced in the U.S. Moscow, Beijing, Athens, Prague.
Honors include 2 Honorary Ph.D’s, 3 Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson
Poetry Prize, 9 Pushcart nominations, NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation
Humanitarian Award, and the Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival as
subject of the documentary, “Flowers and Roots, Ambassador of the Arts.”
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