Dee Rimbaud's Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels will linger in your memory as the lyrics sing from between the surrealist covers of his thoughtful collection of poetry. Taking you on a journey of experience and enlightenment, this Scottish poet guides you through words resonating with beauty, detachment, sympathy and honesty.

Rimbaud is not a poet to skate around issues; instead, he leaps into the bogeyman-infested depths most of us fear to explore. He does this best in poems such as "Asylum Antechamber":

Black cascade, a fragile note hung trembling
In the thick white air: a swansung requiem
To the degeneration of myriad miraculous visions.
Then tell me, what did you see before you spiralled
So recklessly into the abyss?
Did the rainbows taste sweeter
As you tightrope-walked along the edge?

You shaman, you seer,
You mad adventurer,
You intoxicated fool:
Did you laugh
Or did you cry out
When the underworld
Finally enveloped you?

- "Asylum Antechamber"

The fragile sense of a 'dissociated mind' makes an evocative subject. Is the Asylum literal, figurative, the dark recess of our brain or society's pigeonholing of those deemed unable to cope with it? However we perceive the poem, the detail and originality in his descriptions are striking as Rimbaud conveys the sense that there is no future, no hope, and no emotion:

Shuffling through a tarot deck
Of blanked out cards:

- "Asylum Antechamber"

The tarot depicts the future. What happens when the future appears blank? What happens when fate hides from you? Do you then become:

Aggressively still
Against a backdrop
Of mindless movement.

- "Asylum Antechamber"

As the poet's sensitive lines illustrate the emotionally troubled psyche, we sympathise, and feel fear and confusion while struggling to reassure ourselves that we are safe in our familiar roles. But there is no judgement permeating Rimbaud's words. In its place is simply a compassion that the modern world has forgotten to feel:

In my eyes I see your eyes:
The fire dimmed to dull red;
Vacant embers in a frosted bed
Of dank cordite, scorched text
And pilgrim ash.

- "Asylum Antechamber"

Alongside this sensitive and deft touch lies an unexpected ferocity, as in his powerful invocation of the Indian Mother-Goddess Kali. He strongly conveys the fear, confusion and turmoil that this deity delights in her endeavour to destroy the illusions that blind us:

She cries shrill curses at the sun, our mother Kali:
It's her doing, the thunder that rips the valley,
The rain that lashes these flounced silks,
The wind that sours the seed and curdles the milk.

Her hex is cast, forged from raw bronze
In the cauldron, under the earth.
She undermines all sense, all sensibility;
Laughing at our thrashing lunacy;
She would undo every one of us.

The skin that wraps the bone is merely skin
And eyes - so stubbornly blind - but flesh;
And like a butterfly's wing to the cruel finger,
There can be no resistance to her will,
For we are nothing to the twisting of the blade
And out of nothing we will be irrevocably unmade.

- "When The Thunder Spoke"

We are swept along with the image that Rimbaud creates for us. Captivated by this demonic Indian Goddess, as helpless as the male spider when the Black Widow female has had her sexual appetite sated, "[l]aughing at our thrashing lunacy" as she devours us. The sense that we do not control our fates, that we are at the mercy of others, is a dominating theme of Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels and nowhere is this better illustrated than in "When The Thunder Spoke".

Dee Rimbaud is an exciting poet to read. His work is controversial and dynamic. He shakes you out of your modern day slumber to face a reality that can sometimes be brutal. But at the same time, Rimbaud can take the most boring of occasions, like waiting for a delayed flight, and create exquisite love poetry:

I smoke one more cigarette and you sleep
Your tousled head on my lap, your doll hand
Draped languidly in mine.
Almost not here, away in a hallucinating space,
A flickering smile plays upon your face:
You are Kali Ma, dancing the Earth to dust
And I am The Perfume Saint,
Exuding insufferable benign sweetness.

I press my ear to your red, full lips,
Listen to the slow rhythm of your breathing,
The hieroglyphs of your dreams,
The dark ocean of your being;
And through the torpid mist
Of this transitory soulless place
I sense the quintessential spirit,
The ineffable mystery that is you.

- "Frankfurt Airport"

Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels is introspective poetry, concerned with personal choices, experience and sensation. A painful honesty permeates the collection and requires questions to be asked, both of us and of the poet. For example, should we take the enigmatic title of this collection Dropping Ecstasy With The Angles literally? Do we really think that the only possible outcome from use of synthetic substances is death? Should we condemn controlled substance use if it creates poetry such as in this exquisite collection? Alternatively, is the 'drug' a metaphor for poetic inspiration, Rimbaud's own divine experience?

Questions on substance use aside, it is his own lines that sum up the cataclysmic force of Rimbaud's poetry:

Do I master my words?
Or do my words master me?

- "Heaven and Earth"

Can we control our responses to the collection, or do his words overwhelm us? Some of these emotions are applied with gentle brushstrokes and others with the harsh deliberate intent of an artist's palette knife. The result is an all-encompassing collection of colourful emotions for us to glance at, gaze at, and sit before for hours.

Space restricts me from detailing more of his poetry, the hopeless solitude of "When Angels Collide And Bang Their Heads"; the remorse of "The Apple of My Eye"; and the otherworldliness of "Spirit of Iona" to name a few. Overall, this collection is the work of an incredibly talented poet who is able to articulate his message with both sublime poignancy and a razor-sharp directness.

For details on how to purchase copies of Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels £7.99, Bluechrome Publishing, ISBN 1-904781-06-3, see www.thunderburst.co.uk The site also contains examples of his art (Dee designed and created the cover of Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels) and poetry as well as information on his new novel Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God.