Tattered Scrolls and Postulates: Joseph V. Milford

Volume 1 : Poems, Viscera, Encyclopedia, Esoterica

This is his second collection and describes using prose poetry one man’s descent into purgatory after a divorce. It is an epic poem that takes place in Moreland, Georgia and is full of southern flair and fable. The author tried to write 100 10-lined stanzas, made up of lines which are, supposedly, each-unto-themselves, one-line short stories.

Tattered Scrolls and Postulates, Vol. I, by Joseph Victor Milford, is a polymathic roller-coaster ride into the zeitgeist of Western culture combined with the folklore and mysticism of the American South. It portrays a speaker, an anti-hero, who has inherited or earned an incredible wealth of knowledge, but he is crippled in terms of what to do with it. The speaker of this epic poem is in a Faustian situation, and he is trying to win his soul back from his deal with the devil through his own rituals and resurrections stanza by stanza. As we proceed through the epic, which is preceded by an invocation of shamanic proportions, the anti-hero begins to realize that omniscient knowledge can’t save the soul, the mind, the marriage in the book, or the future of the culture, whether it be immediate or global. Another voice enters the text, as we see the plaintive notes at the bottom of each page of the tattered scrolls sequence. The irony of the encyclopedic notes juxtaposed with the pathos of the ritual above them adds even more drama to the text–is this an edited text? And whose voice has now intervened, after the fact, to explain the esoteric and oracular explosions at the papyri of every initial scroll? Is the whole book a cosmic joke to destroy narrative even further? Has our hero even survived his own sequence of invocational rapture? The book finishes up with two epic poems: The Morphnacular, which is an urban excursion into a Vegas-like hallucinatory escape for the speaker, and then the contemplative, “What We Wrote On The City’s Walls”, which brings the entire lexicon to a close as the anti-hero returns from the journey to leave his legacy like the spent Gilgamesh that he is.

Paperback: 168 pages
Publisher: Backlash Press (15 Aug. 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0995599918
Product Dimensions: 152 x 229 mm