Vagabond – serie

"My sight if fades and fading faded forms reveals; ageing looks beyond its age to shrivelled centuries beyond decades." The presbyopic poet cannot focus on "the self as subject", but only on what is distant. This collection of poetry attempts to detach the writer from the obsessions that have dominated poetry for so long: sentiment, love, feelings and the autobiographical in general. To completely dispose of these would be dogmatic, and Cameron argues that some of the greatest poets are both presbyopic and myopic. "And yet he fell apart, and headstrong held to that one truth, while falling and parting for his way, his lonely way of wanting justice for the damned." This poetry is unfashionably but unashamedly political and philosophical. Cameron continues to express in another form the contempt he feels for utilitarianism in general, and in particular its crude and extreme variety, as peddled by neo-conservative politicians and their intellectual bag-carriers. At the same time, he attempts to invent new poetic forms.Inspired by some Italian poets (especially Eugenio Montale), he uses metre and some rhyme, but then breaks it up by introducting enjambement and internal rhymes as well. There are English influences too: most surprisingly Rudyard Kipling's "Mary Gloster" in part inspired "Zarathustra's Last Interview", the longest narrative poem in this collection. "We thank thee Lord for having made us free to rule the world and liberate its inner need to be so much more like us." This poetry is unashamedly anti-imperialist. "That war with wings of death does twist and crush and kill the flimsy leathered bag of flesh and bone and liquid life that spills upon the sands, requires no second telling." This poetry is unashamedly anti-war. "Only this empty moment which I spectate is in my clasp; amongst this fractured stillness, something knowable comes close and just eludes the closing fingers of my mind's grasp" This poetry is for those who have more doubts than certainties.

Klaus, the core work in this collection, is a a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life, while referring back to the trials of the Mann family (Klaus being Thomas Mann's son) and Klaus's own autobiographical novel, Mephisto, one of his better known works partly because it was banned in West Germany for decades for its portrayal of his ex-lover Gustaf Grundgens, before being turned into an Academy Award-winning film. Massie's novella attempts to unlock Klaus's relationship with his father, his former lover and his art. Klaus is an appropriate follow-on from Surviving (Vagabond Voices, 2009) in that writing is a major theme. With his usual thoroughness disguised by concision and a masterly light touch, Massie sets about examining how human relatinoships and artistic endeavour interact, and this book also goes back to those "public" themes that dominate so much of his other works of fiction set in the twentieth century. The novella alone would make this collection worthy of note, but the short stories will also fascinate the many who know Massie's work and admire it. They come from his long writing career and have been published under one cover for the first time.Klaus and two other stories has just been written, while there are others from the nineties, the eighties and even the seventies.