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Synopsis
The Blue Cat is a courteous, well-read, outspoken, randy anarchist ready again to lay down one of his lives for what he believes. He’s a cross between Top Cat, Puss in Boots, Schrödinger’s Cat and the Cat in the Hat. He’s a trickster, a prankster, an illusionist and an illusion. And he’s back... The Blue Cat Walks the Earth is the third book in which Frank Reeve has let the Blue Cat out of the bag. He’s a couple of years older, but he’s still the actor he was. The only way he can get people to listen is to pretend he’s not saying what he is saying. Of course, he’s telling the truth. But you don't have to believe him. Nine lives out of ten, the truth is unbelievable. This book comes with a CD of Frank Reeve reading these new poems, accompanied by Don Davis on sax and Joe Deleault on piano.
“To counteract the primal liars / the Blue Cat set out to climb higher”It’s not everyday you open up a new book of poetry to be greeted with a shiny hour-long CD of the author reading his works to the sounds of improv jazz. And since my knowledge of jazz doesn’t stretch far past The Fast Show, it’s been a bit of an eye-opener.This collection is the third outing for the Blue Cat, American poet F.D.Reeve’s reincarnated self, and his vehicle for many a satirical sideswipe at everything from celebrity worship and the Bush administration to global warming and the collapse of the subprime. Reeve merrily invokes the suspicious, even conspiratorial qualities of our feline friends, and such is the scope of the Blue Cat’s wanderings that we even get a rippling of blues on Hurricane Katrina, and a jaunty square-dance on civilian casualties in Iraq. There are also moments of unerring beauty (Envy: Imagining the Life of a Bird), and some serious philosophising on the flexibility and utter contradictoriness of that thing we call History. Try this one on for size: In physics it’s true that what can’t be seen must exist, but who has worked out the equations for history? As for the CD, the jazz is a perfect backdrop for the Cat’s wide-ranging catalogue of interest: sometimes vibrant and frolicking, other times sombre and ominous. More important, though, is the voice of F.D. Reeve himself – we get a real sense of the man’s own cadencing, his gravelly yet playful tones, and how he intends each poem to be read. I remember T.S. Eliot once talking about what he called “the alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified)”, and this poetry has exactly that. It’s all very surreal – a cat that’s blue? A cat that speaks? – but somehow it all serves to make what we’re reading/hearing all the more powerful. It’s a wacky yet thought-provoking examination of those “temptingly everpresent ambiguities” that surround us each day, on the sidewalk and on the news. Above all, it’s proof that Art and politics really do mix.
James Hogg
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