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'Dropping
Ecstasy With The Angels' is Dee Sunshine's second collection of poetry. It
follows on from where 'The Bad Seed' left off: that is, moving (haltingly)
towards the light. Of course, anyone familiar with Dee's earlier work will
know fine that this light can burn as well as illuminate. There's no
namby-pamby new age platitudes in here. Dee's poetry is as razor sharp and
keen as it always was, but now it is tempered with a certain maturity, and he
is even occasionally prone to the odd outburst of startling lyrical beauty.
He confesses to being sometimes 'surprised by joy'. There is a spiritual
alacrity to even the darker poems in this collection, informed by a damascus
road experience he had at the age of 30 (which led him to discover his
abilities as a spiritual healer) and compounded by the discovery of the
empathogenic drug, Ecstasy, at the rather late age of 35. These influences
have had a profound effect on Dee and on his writing, which has, over the
years, become more accessible, even to the point that his work has started
appearing in highly regarded literature magazines like Acumen, Orbis, Other
Poetry, The North American Review, Black Mountain Review and others. Of
course, Dee's poetry is still peopled by drifters, dreamers, losers,
lunatics, the unemployed, the homeless, junkies, jakies and punks, but these
days he casts a much more tender, loving eye on them. |
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