Misty Thule

“Adieu wingless life and gray reason” bids the author of this decadent fever dream, a key document of the 19th-century symbolist movement. In a series of chapter-length prose poems, Retté uses immediate and often fragmented sensory impressions to relate travel through a remote land of the imagination “in which the worlds of fable are elaborated” and the themes of death, decay, and damnation in which the narrative is grounded manifests as images of “poets, sick of a Psyche, who prowl black puddles and splash one another with dirty water and variegated rhymes” and a tree of life that bears “fruits of death.” Key among the characters who embody the tale’s tenets is a pauper whose efforts (in one episode) to derail the tragic love of Romeo for Juliet encapsulates the sense of doomed romance that infuses the story. Laced with references to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Théophile Gautier, and other classic fantasists, Rette’s work is a plunge into a surreal world of specialized aesthetic interest. (Aug.)