COPACABANA AT MIDNIGHT

A collection offers a buffet of surf-and-turf poetry with a serving of gothic short stories for dessert.

Three distinct streams cascade through this sizable volume of oceanic writings by mariner-turned-writer Brewer. The first features poetry drawn from the primal hunger of the sea and those on it, painting an eerie vision of loss and longing in the tradition of William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe. In one poem, the dark and exotic ocean swallows up time itself, keeping a sailor from his true love and family while bringing age and exhaustion through the hard work. In another piece, a seaworthy man becomes like the land bird he sees “perched upon the mast,” wondering “what could cause him blunder / out above the open sea / so very far from field or tree / which he seeks now desperately.” Interspersed between these offerings are numbered poems set in a world of high fantasy, brimming with goddesses, witches, mermaids, and sorcerers. The appearance of “The Red Witch” harkens back to maritime themes, invoking the 1948 John Wayne film Wake of the Red Witch. The collection ends on a selection of short stories featuring murderous sock monkeys, violent eroticism, and, most notably, the “Copacabana at Midnight,” which sees an aging sex worker give herself to the sexual goddess Pomba Gira. Brewer’s poems transition naturally, with shared themes and imagery often feeding from one piece into the next like a tributary into a river. “Our Secret Dale” is a dream of an unrushed time with a faraway love “to taste your pillowed lips sublime.” This is followed by one of the numbered, fantasy-themed works in which passion becomes more sinister and savage: “She’s with me in my dream again. / Her warm touch burns upon my skin.” Imagery like this is used time and again to deftly shift the tone without ever feeling like a non sequitur. The albatross around the neck of this collection is its third section. Though the titular tale and a run-in with a poisonous sea slug make perfect sense, the inclusion of more modern horror and Ralph Ellison–esque SF stories feels like a splash of cold water in the face. A personal essay about the living death of cancer, though moving, also seems out of place among the book’s heavily curated nautical themes.

A seafaring poetry collection that sails smoothly until some short fiction knocks it off course.