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Best advice to the reader who picks up a poetry book that's a winner of a press contest: read the work for the work and not the catch-accolade and the blurbs. That's just this reviewer's opinion, and is not "playa-hating" to such winners. Case in point is The Red Light Was My Mind by Gary Charles Wilkens. Blues music is used as a spring board into a stark reality, which makes this worth a read. The collection bears witness to a world of grit and yellow clay, exposing its secrets unashamed and set to twelve bars of the rawest blues. Wilkens, a genuine "southern boy" touts his roots on his sleeve in this full-length, threading together virtual snippets of rural life, amid hurting and hormones, meshed with the desperation and hardship that has always been the makings for the blues. And through the words of Red Light, Wilkens summons and conveys the ghostly voices of Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. In the poem dedicated to (and orate by ) the latter of the three, Blind Lemon tells his life in Blind Jefferson:
These "voices", as they are, are told with a conviction that goes beyond the reader needing to know what is actual fact or poetic licence. In Sworn Testimony, Johnson R., Yazoo County Mississippi, where the fabled story of Robert Johnson and the Devil is told, Johnson starts out:
Entering Red Light are characters that astound the reader with a down to earth-ness, resounding with the ribald, they would make Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner proud. We meet Leroy who owns a house of cat fish. "The palms of his wide hands are nearly white." Waiting tables for Leroy is Trina, a seventeen year old meth addict with strawberry-blond hair that, "Made men/ Give big tips and drop lewd hints." In the kitchen is Bertha who drinks from a black bottle that she calls her "Assistant" and will "knock your white ass out" if you call her "Big Black Bertha". Unusual "poems", however, this sequence of character sketches give me the impression of the author sitting in Leroy's house of cat fish with his note book opened just people-watching. That keen sense of observing the everyday adds merit to Red Light, along with the sharp use of everyday language, (and the occasional linguistic cliche). ___________ Mike Amado, a performance poet from Plymouth Massachusetts who has been published in the Wilderness House Literary Review, the Sherman Café Poetry Box among others. He has featured at such venues as Word on the Street, Open Bark, Kisskadee Coffee co., Mad Poets’ Café, The Art and Soul Festival, Porter Square Books, Gypsy Pashn’s Poetry Caravan
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