The One in the Many

by Eric LeMay

Kandahar, a city of Pashtuns noted for their gaiety, where Mullah Omar had made his final headquarters, has traditions of men in high-heeled sandals, with make-up of khol and painted nails like the sultry silent-movie stars.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932023038
• ISBN13: 9781932023039
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Zoo Press
• Length: 123 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Light

The One in The Many creates a world in parables. LeMay flees past the quotidian spaces and places most people and even poets inhabit, to depict instead the shadowed and fantastic realms of dream, intellect, and imagination. From these heights, and from their corresponding nightmare depths, the poet draws characters at once sooty and sublime. In prose, in prophesy, yet above all, in Poetry, the book subtly imagines the cruelties these characters inflict, suffer, and ignore, while yet suggesting the deep beauty that characterizes our "Present Time, Which is the End of the World." For through Lemay's poetic vision, we Many-the odd, the old, the silly, and the selfish-do indeed become One, transfigured together, in the book's closing image, "in a brilliant, blinding light."

Startling and Beautiful, Pious and Perverse

The One and the Many by Eric Charles LeMay is a startling collection of writing that challenges the boundaries between poetry and prose. In the poems proper, the reader is submitted to a painfully beautiful, and yet enigmatic, confession of a lost innocence, a paradise lost, which is however glimpsed only through the current veil of clever imagination. The themes often surround the inseparability of God and procreation, piety and perversion, serenity and severity. Often the heaviness is balanced with a playfulness and a pleasure in savoring the words which bear sometimes unbearable messages. The book is punctuated by miniature plays, amazingly original characters who suffer implied but humorously articulated fates. A fascinating book.

Where did this come from?

You really don't ever find books like this one! The One in the Many is terrifically intelligent, deeply felt and moving, beautifully imagistic, and above all, written in poetry that reminds you why you started loving words in the first place. Unlike most current poetry, which seems to have one character, one voice, and one tale to tell, this book seems to build a whole world of characters, from all across time, from the imagination as well as reality. Yet instead of feeling disjointed or impersonal, the result becomes so human that you feel as though the poems were some realization of your own dreams and nightmares, visions and past, told in symbols and sinuous language. We all have seen characters like "Pester" on the street, but Eric Lemay gives them full lives and distinct voices. And through the voices of his tale-tellers, the philosophers, the androgynous Eve, rings this great sense of humour and appreciation of life in all its twists and bizareness. Read this book if you want a new sense of our strange/magical world, and of poetry, and all the real power it still has today in writers like this one!

the one

if lemay's debut is just one in the many, them i'm lucky to have found this needle in the haystack. though the pages are few, the words are monumentous. each poem, play or short prose piece is a pleasure to read -- and you will have to read them again and again to catch each clever line and idea. but rereading (and i recommend reading aloud) only makes you appreciate lemay's writing even more. lemay is a talent -- i can only hope that his "one in the many" will not be the only one he publishes.

Would it be extravagant to compare Eric LeMay to Dante?

Would it be extravagant to compare Eric LeMay to Dante? Not once you've read his book. He is a poet of Heaven and Hell in the grand tradition of his poetic forefathers. But Eric LeMay reimagines the realms of pleasure and damnation as vividly present here on Earth, inside all the quirky strangers on the street and alive in our own minds and lives. The result is an astonishing book, which feels both comic and tragic, otherwordly and very real. He leaves the reader with some grimy belief in beauty and some despairing kind of hope. After all, his words alone prove that Beauty does still exist.