An American Unconscious

Mebane Roberston’s verse has only gone deeper since Signal from Draco (2007). These are poems rich in imbedded information, tracing thought and emotion through the entire bric-a-brac of experience. There are bouts of lyric clarity and sudden plunges through cogitating thickets. Mebane’s layered soliloquies refuse to broker an expedient deal with daily living and the nightcrawl to come up with something reassuringly tidy. If Berryman was here, and he could mosh, he might say these lines. An American Unconscious reports on our shared dysfunctional urban pastoral of ＂brittle days, nervous nights.＂ The poems have both the swift trajectory and the tactile depth of paintings, as in ＂Kandinsky in Love＂ ＂This blue verse is immersed in the clear serum she used to use / To make her black hair give off a radiant sheen.＂ Reader, there aren’t many poets about whom you can honestly say that no one else has ever written lines like these. Here is a true one. And he already knows you, the way you thought only you know yourself.

Mebane Robertson was born in Lynchburg, Virginia and spent his formative years in Richmond where he attended private schools which ousted him one after the other, although not for poor academic performance. He went on to graduate from The College of William and Mary with a B.A. He moved thereafter to New Orleans, LA where he was employed in the French Quarter and resided on St. Charles Ave, where he endured the Mardi Gras floats passing his apartment as harbingers to Fat Tuesday. Robertson was writing and publishing in various journal at this time. He also wrote fiction and devoted much attention to songwriting. After New Orleans, he moved to Brooklyn where he spent most of his time (again) writing poems, fiction, and songs. This period ultimately ended in academic labors in adjunct professorships and a Ph.D. in English from Fordham University. He is currently living out the aftermath of his academic work, not in serving as a professor, but in pursuing his time writing poems, stories, and music. What will happen hence remains to be seen. Robertson’s first book A Signal from Draco was published in 2007 and included work from chapbooks and various literary journals in which he had published including ＂The Belloit Poetry Journal,＂ ＂The Journal )OSU),＂ ＂Guernica,＂ ＂Able Muse,＂ and others. The present volume comprises many of the poems he has written since then.＂