Dark Octaves

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Not since I sat down half a century ago on a bookstore floor with a paperback copy of Alan Dugan's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Poems</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> have I been so astonished. </span><span style=color: rgba(4 12 40 1)>Like the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand with its nine extra bass keys </span><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Paino has a supernumerary octave up his sleeve that lends unparalleled depth to this collection. - Roger Weingarten</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>*************</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Frank Paino's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Dark Octaves</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> a postmodern canon akin to Blake's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Marriage of Heaven and Hell </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>or Milton's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Paradise Lost</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is nothing less than epic an existential odyssey its protagonist a modern-day Prometheus suspended from a dystopian cliff. Paino's speaker tasks his muse from the outset: It will be the new tongue / you speak. His poems are masterful his language striking and edgy a delivery in exquisite allegorical form in historical mythical and current time-persons places and events that reveal our human condition and its construct of desire and redemption-its beauty and longing its contradictions and failures. From the martyrdom of St. Catherine of Siena and her holy anorexia to Icarus and his flight into the sun from the miraculous metamorphosis of the luna moth to the knee on the neck of George Floyd these poems startle expose and transmute their audience ushering urgency and social responsibility. </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Dark Octaves</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> ends with the words beautiful indifference an oxymoronic paradox that alarms complacency. Paino's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Dark Octaves</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is a call to awaken. -Rosa Lane</span></p><p></p>