Arthur Dies: First Chronicle, Vol. 4

In this 4th volume of Arthur Dies, the literary, experimental and multilingual excitement ramps up several notches, including several pages of visual guides and visual poetry. The great Merlin shows up, wearing a plague mask, and there are hints that Arthur himself may be on the verge of being born; is it true?! This is not just a re-telling of a famous legend/history, but a re-imagining and re-creating of a story/myth that encompasses all of history and all of human imagination. About an earlier volume of Lindsann's epic project, Iván Argüelles said: "This is in fact an epic both in the traditional sense of the word, and in the approach of an anti-poetics perspective of what can be undone in that tradition. In its sweeping texts and contexts it embodies not only the imagined or fictive culture of the twilight era alluded to, but those of our own post-modern and failed civilization with all its cultural and literary -isms that have arisen from an original 'avant-garde'. Lindsann combines the mythical Avalon with Blake's Albion, pursuing these emblematic nomenclatures to their illogical fusion in an always enigmatic concatenation of events and personages flung about in a supreme and deft literary whirl." This new volume is enriched with four appendices, which provide a narrative synopsis of the previous volumes, a list of principal characters, a social glossary, and a list of sources. All of which are extremely useful for following the development of this incredible epic anti-poem, a work which redefines both poetry and epic. - John M. Bennett