"Australian superb writer, fabulist, and surrealist poet, Boris Glikman. I completely agree with the well known veteran television, film and theatre actor Lewis Fiander's comment above regarding Boris; he truly is possessed with a "touch of genius." A lot of writers worldwide are natural storytellers with their own unique prose style 'en potencia'; what separates the truly great poetic and narrative voices with their signature styles and ways of structuring both their poems and creative fictions from the simply good and finally ordinary journeyman scribes and scribblers, for me, is their desire to perfect their craft, as well as constantly update their world view through an interaction between their constant reading and writing.
Glikman is an exemplar of a sort of conscientious perfectionist of a writer (think of Gustave Flaubert measuring the importance of every word in Madame Bovary, and you'll get a sense of what I mean) who has raised himself above the middling crowd of postmodern fantasist authors influenced by surrealism and 20th Century self-referentiality in their meta-fictions, because he not only thinks and feels deeply about the world and the technology that is transforming its human inhabitants at an amazing accelerating rate, but also, he has mastered all the necessary techniques to tell his tales quickly, in a limpid prose as transparent as the window in A Dog's Tale.
In addition, he has never lost his original sense of wonder and surprise at the strangeness of the cosmos and the way its uniform laws can be suddenly broken or shattered as quickly as Humpty Dumpty, and in the wink of a sleeping god's eye can't be put back together again. "Ostranamie", or 'making strange,' was the Russian Formalist term for the process of taking the quotidian and forcing the reader or viewer of literature or art to reconsider it anew by recombining mundane elements in a new way. I think of Glikman's satirical take on the I-phone in his fable THE ME PHONE; or the unique descriptors he puts together--Rhonda the radio show host pointed this out-- to have us look at two distinct events, the Holocaust and John Lennon's death, in a radically new way in Ode To A Century Past.
What was exciting about this radio broadcast was that I suddenly realized, listening to these poems and stories in a first rate radio format for the first time, read by the author in his soft, orotund voice, that they sounded even better out loud than they read silently on the spoken page. This clearly shows what a good ear for language Glikman has, to go along with his daring and mind-bending ability to transmogrify ordinary objects and events from everyday life into astonishing paradoxes and impossible worlds. I thought of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Orhan Pamhuk, and for some strange reason also the visual artist M.C. Escher when I listened to Boris Glickman's works. They are extraordinary teaching stories, with underlying mathematical and logical patterns that rupture the flow of consciousness and thrust the reader or listener into unforgettable imaginal spaces. I hope we hear a lot more from Boris Glikman very soon; I can't wait for his first book to be published, because I want to buy several signed copies of the first edition before the collectors move in to store them in plastic bags for sale on whatever Ebay is alive and kicking twenty, thirty years from now.
John F. Walter ~ teacher & playwright
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