SHOCK WAVES: Letters from the Edge

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SHOCK WAVES: Letters from the Edge

SHOCK WAVES: Letters from the Edge (Published by Vantage Press, New York, 1987, pp. 55, $6.95 ISBN 0-533-07281-6, Hardback)

Shock Waves: Letters From The Edge is Joseph V. Danoski's first collection of poems, under his pen name, Jonathan Konrad. The poems reveal 'the strange and inverted world' of Danoski, 'poet of the nuclear age'. The first poem, and one of finest in this collection, describes that the poet is "a stranger with stranger ways":

I'm the most charming of charmers

When people play the game I say,

Or a soldier in my armor-

Standing so close yet so far away

("The Dead of Night", p. 1)

Some of the most striking effects and shock waves the poet creates through subtle incongruities:

Let us live the living night,

Do the dance of dark delight:

Give your life

To live the rite

Of the living night!

("The Rite of the Living Night", p. 5)

Danoski's "Mansion of madness" is blended "with gardens of grandeur". The poet is most characteristically himself when he is concrete and realistic:

Welcome to the waiting room,

With the distant future

Feeling of doom.

("The Waiting Room", p. 22)

And I was thinking

One man's sunset is another man's dawn.

("The Nomads of No-man's-land", p.51)

Shock Waves clearly proves that Danoski is one of the most gifted poets. He is a complete poet.

-Santosh Kumar

Joseph V. Danoski lives happily on the "plains of his imagination" in the White Mountains of New Hampshire; published his first book of poems, Shock Waves: Letters From The Edge (1987), under his "infamous pen name, Jonathan Konrad"; a writer of letters and essays on diverse subjects, but first and foremost, a poet of horror, science fiction and fantasy; several poems published in The Berlin Reporter.