DRIFTING IN PARADISE, Road Map to Reality: Essential Existential Poetry

Product Description

Sub-titled “Essential Existential Poetry,” this collection of 40 years of Key West sub-tropical living illuminates the secret internal workings of a capitalist fascist democracy. Cheap at the price for college people to preview life in the real world and to do better in it. The poet has done every manual labor job in Key West and on the Gulf Stream and shares his first-person tough experience. He survived to become free and happy and shares those feelings too. It’s just plain beautiful rhythmic language that is refreshing and informative to read at leisure.

Review

Allen “Somerset” Meece’s  Drifting in Paradise
Reviewed by M. R. Willison

 You never know what others are up to, but in the case of Somerset Meece, you know it’s got to be poetry.  He reads his poems at the Key West Poetry Guild, which he guided for many years, and he has published his poetry.

This chapbook is a cornucopia of experiences and, as its sub-title declares, is a road map to reality. 

…..Its Preface and four clever Section heads and twelve Chapter titles develop emergent and connected themes, starting with “an outsider’s view of capitalism” and “Hire Education.” Here his first sections begin excoriating North American materialist illusions that breed an ambitious, avaricious consumer culture, even as capitalism sends its workers into penury (“Here’s to the Rich”). 

…..Somerset focuses on his book’s own anguished persona, a man abandoned by his wife (the story “Walker”) ending up broke in Key West (“Someone Else’s Problem”).  Section 3, Adrift, has the poet’s persona living among the homeless (“Peregrine”), to whom this book is also dedicated.  These poems of anguish, like a Category 5 hurricane,  are clearly torn from Meece’s own experience, not mere pale recollections or descriptions. 

…..Somerset cries out from his own descent into alcoholic risk-takingand irresponsibility, (“Adrift”).  This personal history, written from life, conveys a searing experience that is for a reader who hasn’t undergone such a purgatory of the soul.  His arrest and probationary therapy (“Intervention,” a short story) slowly turns him toward a far more rewarding life (as can be pursued maybe only in Key West; see “This Island Town”).  Yet through all these travails, Somerset writes that he carried with him his writing notebook, always responding as a writer to his experience.  The realization of his aspiration is confirmed and validated by his book — Drifting in Paradise. 

…..The poems and short  stories from his time of troubles, and his recent ones, have the direct, personal verve and enthusiasm that characterizes all Somerset’s work.

…..He is fascinated by all that surround us, otherwise so often ignored–nature, love, life itself, with all their manifold conundrums.  And especially in the fourth section, TropicStyle, but throughout the book  he appeals to his and our own natural playfulness, to our wonder and pity, and ultimately, to our appreciation for life fully lived (“Give Me No Tomorrows”) and the search for personal and social freedom (“Bike Man of Key West”) found in shared life (“This Island Town”) and love (“Bright Silken Tents”).

From the Author

Allen Leonard “Somerset” Meece was born in Somerset Kentucky in 1944 and went to Key West as an infant where his father, Avert, was serving on a Navy patrol boat hunting German submarines preying on Gulf Stream shipping during WWII……After Somerset himself joined the Navy, he went to the Fleet Sonar School in Key West where he learned to track submarines with sonar signals. It was during the cold war with Russia which was threatening the security of ‘democracy’ by deploying guided missile submarines? …..Somerset’s warship attempted to invade, dominate and pacify Viet Nam but his destroyer was chased out of the Tonkin Gulf by unhappy torpedo boats from the socialist, wishfully sovereign, government of North Viet Nam. …..That experience resulted in the fines