Category Archives: Malcolm Campbell

The Rabbi, The Goddess, and Jung

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Review by Malcolm R. Campbell

In the introduction to this spiritual and psychological collection of essays, poet and Jungian analyst Naomi Ruth Lowinsky writes, “I didn’t have to account to God or my analyst for why I wasn’t Moses, or for that matter, Jung. I had to account for why I wasn’t Naomi.”

This visionary collection follows the transformations that molded Lowinsky from the prima materia of her young self in chaos and doubt into the Naomi that life and the gods were waiting for her to discover.

Readers of The Rabbi, the Goddess, and Jung witness outrageous fortune’s wont to injure seekers of the voice within with the arrows from its quiver of devils, demons, shadows, temptations and tricks. Ultimately, when the seeker hears and responds in harmony to that voice, s/he discovers the meaning of Joseph Campbell’s promise that “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are” and that the Tewa prayer’s answer from nature’s light in “Song of the Sky Loom” is a Garment of Brightness. Continue reading →

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

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“You won’t forget this story even though you will try.”

Review by Malcolm Campbell

“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll hear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.”

Riverrun of words, past church and family and worse, from swerve of hope to bend of knee, you might think you’re reading “Finnegan” again as you start Eimear McBride’s streamOFconsciousness novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. James Joyce leaves early on, though when you reach the novel’s final words, you might agree this story is a wake.

It’s also a mental letter of sorts, an interior monologue, from a rebellious sister to a brother with a brain tumor, within.the.tight.confines of a dysfunctional household, abuse and other perversions, rape and WorseThanRape, and the protagonist’s desperately destructive behavior. We are INside her head. Too much for simple syntax there, though sin is a constant theme, and prayers, too, so when James Joyce leaves the book by the back door, Virginia Woolf arrives at the front door. Figuratively speaking. You should be afraid, for this book will wreck you as though you yourself are violating the protagonist page by heartbreaking page, you bastard. Continue reading →

Political Clouds Loom Over the Sunshine State: Mercedes Wore Black

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A book review of Andrea Brunais’ Mercedes Wore Black

by Malcolm R. Campbell

When the hard-hitting environmental reporter Janis Hawk is downsized out of her job at the Bradenton, Florida Mercury Sun she’s certain her newspaper career is over compliments of the powerbrokers who don’t like her news stories showing how often commerce and politics win out over Florida’s vanishing wild areas. However, when a friend steps forward to finance her as a “backpack reporter,” Janis soon discovers that the kind of people who got rid of her job might also want to get rid of her permanently. Continue reading →

A Powerful Story of Motherhood, Seasons, and Snakes

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A new edition of Snakes by Patricia Damery has just been published by Leaping Goat Press

Review by Malcolm R. Campbell

Snakes, a powerful story by Patricia Damery is a beautifully written novel about a woman coming to terms with family continuity as small farms are packed up and sold off at auctions to those who will never know who once lived there and made of them enduring homes. Angela leaves the Midwestern farm her family has worked for generations because the roads and fields and traditions are, in spite of their deep values, confining to her coming-of-a-age soul. She attends college in California, receives a degree in biology, becomes a teacher, marries, and has a family. When teaching proves to be an unsatisfactory career, she focuses on her new and all-consuming avocation of weaving. Continue reading →

Eighty Wondrous Steps to Enchantment

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Eighty Wondrous Steps to Enchantment

Songs for Ophelia by Theodora Goss

Review by Malcolm R. Campbell

“The collection you hold in your hands is otherworldly, it is elegant, it is delicate. It is graceful, it is exquisite and ethereal. It is full of flowers and fairies and a piercing, thorny longing.” — Catherynne M. Valente from the Introduction.

When you open this 146-page volume of eighty poems collected into songs for the seasons, the ethereal grace of Theodora Goss’ words and themes may attract your attention first. After all, the book begins with “Spring Songs,” and they are full of rebirth, promise and a garden of dazzling delights. Were you to begin at the ice and snow end of the book, the thorny longing would be more readily apparent, and you would know why Catherynne M. Valente named her introduction “A Weaponized Elegance.” Continue reading →