David Crews

INCANTATION
poems by David Crews
book design by Josh Dannin
Directangle Press, 24 pp.
First ed., 2022 | Second ed., 2023

Incantation was a limited edition, handmade chapbook of poems created in collaboration with Josh Dannin at directanglepress.com. The first edition of one hundred books was made in August of 2022. The cover was letterpress printed with debossed engraving on French Speckletone Sand, poem sequence typeset in Garamond Premier Pro and risograph printed on French Kraft-Tone Standard White Kraft. The second edition of one hundred books came the following spring of 2023. That cover letterpress printed with debossed engraving on Colorplan Mid Green. There are no plans to make further editions, though included below are previously published poems, reviews, and interviews from the project, as well as some reflections on the work (printed as Afterword) by poet and historian Paul Genega.

Previously published poems:

The Mermaid 2
Pif Magazine / 2019

To dream, swim
The HOPPER / 2020

Three poems from Incantation
The Wild Word / 2021

On INCANTATION
by Paul Genega

A shipwrecked sailor stares up from roiling waters at a naked female figure perched on a rock ledge. She gazes back at him with an impassive, enigmatic expression. It might be bland curiosity; it might even be pity. Except for fish scales on her lower legs, there is nothing monstrous about her, no flesh shredding beak or talons, nothing to suggest she is responsible for this young man’s plight except the lyre she clutches, her lips parted in song, and the seductive beauty of her pose.

John William Waterhouse painted this mysterious scene in his 1900 work, The Siren. Waterhouse (1849-1917) was a Pre-Raphaelite working at the tail end of that artistic movement, nearly a half century from its foundational prime. Nonetheless, he cleaves closely to the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic: favoring atmosphere and mood over narrative; looking to myth and legend for source material; paying scrupulous attention to detail, especially in depiction of the natural world; and eschewing political and social commentary for spiritual depth and simplicity.

David Crews’ Incantation, a spellbinding sequence of eighteen poems inspired by Waterhouse’s painting, is in many ways also a Pre-Raphaelite work. Not that it would be easily catalogued with Swinburne or either of the Rossettis, but because it harkens back to that aesthetic in its lyricism, its sensuality, and its defiance of a world that sometimes seems as if it “wants to destroy itself.”

The sequence begins with an incantation, a calling forth of the mythic figure from the beyond—spirit world, shadow, sea. She will appear not just in familiar Western guises, but in manifestations from cultures from around the globe, including the Yoruban, Maori, Inuit and Thai. Whether in nature or dream or poetic imagination, the interactions between mortal and myth are fleeting, the elusive female figure appearing and disappearing, approaching and receding, much the way the tides move, or the way “rumped warblers / into the autumn olive / duck and hide.”

In the Waterhouse painting, even as the mariner struggles for his life, he is clearly captivated by the vision in front of him, eyes wide with wonder and awe. So too are the speakers in Incantation, with a “cup of longing,” a “low throb,” an “ache” which is both physical and spiritual. On one level, Crews has written a complex love poem about two beings who can never come together as long as one remains alive as a human being, their brief encounters fueling both passion and despair.

Incantation is a “flute of memory”—that is, a receptacle for memory and an instrument for its music. Insight and song—that is what this suite of poems is after.

At the same time, the poems explore a remarkable range of themes—love, myth, creativity, mortality, art, beauty, gender, sensuality—insight after insight, song after song. All the music, all the discourse, all the feeling, all the changing voices, perspectives and points of view, leading, as they must, to the eternal, “the open sea that holds a death / for each of us, where reflection / if in repose becomes itself.”

David Crews’ Incantation is a tour-de-force, and in its beautiful, fragmented creation and re-creation of art and myth, a model for what Ekphrastic poetry can be.

Paul Genega
Stuyvesant, New York
2022

inter/(re)views from INCANTATION

Review of Incantation by Basia Wilson
Barrelhouse Mag / 2003

New interview on Incantation and the writing life
with poet Dimitri Reyes / 2023

Review of Incantation by Anne Marie Wells
Atticus Review / 2023

Live poetry + percussion: Incantation @ The Loading Dock
Littleton, NH / 2022

Poet David Crews relishes summer on the farm, mermaids and the land
Interview + poem from Incantation with Todd Moe
North Country Public Radio / 2022

Finally, here are some personal reflections on the work… what it has meant to me and where it all sort of came from (thanks for listening).