By Susan McCaslin, Poet
When reading B.W. Powe’s Mysteria,I moved through it slowly, sensing I was being taken on a magical, consciousness-raising journey. The combination of handwritten and typed pages drew me in. Because of its power to delve into a unique union of the everyday and the mystical I fell in love with it from the start.
Much of the work is set during Covid. Some of the poems and pieces reveal the dynamic process of writing, while others display poems typed or handwritten in blue ink. The visuals and words blend into a single whole. The movements remind me of William Blake’s journey through the realms of Innocence and Experience where he accesses a third realm that synthesizes the dualism of the two states of consciousness into a higher unity.
In the early sections, Powe shines light on Cordoba and other parts of Spain through stories of its famous writers, artists, architects, musicians as well as family members and lesser-known people. Yet he also focuses his lens on his readers. He takes us to La Alhambra in Granada where Islamic architecture still fascinates. In Cordoba he leads us to the Mesquite, the former capital of the Caliphate. There he introduces us to the oldest library in the city where he wrote and studied before it was locked down. We discover how throughout Spain’s history various races and cultures co-existed including Iberians, Basques, Celts, Romans, Moors, Muslims, Jews, and Christians. In other sections, readers are swept into the beauty of the land’s wildness and mysteries.
The book has been seen as a “graphic novel” because Powe often breaks through the literal to the mythic. He transforms experiences drawn from his daily life that are also universal. Yet his stories and anecdotes express his love for family members. The mythic-mystic passages are sparked by something Powe catches in a reference, an allusion, a line.
In the process, Powe explores the liminal and mystical realms of dreams and visionary experiences, their “fragments and wholes.” The title Mysteria indicates he is working out of global apophatic traditions where mystery, the unknown, opens to the heart of things which is both beyond and within the infinite, within and beyond language. Like Dionysius the Areopagite (late 5th or early 6th century) and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing (14th century), Powe turns us to the “Via Negativa” to stress the ineffable while living in the zone between time and eternity. His diverse pieces and sections merge into a whole in which words and sacred silences are one. His words on the Sufi poet Rumi capture the paradox of transcending the egoic self:
Ascend beyond poetry, Rumi says.
Burn away forms until
the transcendent realm is revealed.
Burn away what you expect,
the automatic – from yourself,
and the proposals about yourself.
Powe’s poems lift readers into the musicality of silence.
Susan McCaslin: My most recent volume of poetry is Field Play (Ekstasis Editions, 2024). See my other works on my website: http://www.susanmccaslin.ca/
