I, Odysseus
This collection was built round the title poem. It is apparently very different from Discontinued Design, drawing on Greek myth, including several translations from classical Greek, and also making use of the surrealism found, for example, in Lorca, whose poetry Leo had been translating for BBC Television. Charles Causley wrote, delighting in the opening lines of I, Odysseus “ … I seem to see them / As time gaped open …”. He commented on the difference between this second book and Discontinued Design as follows:
“Why shouldn’t a poet have 2 faces, or 3 faces, or 333333333333333?”
Mr Aylen is a learned poet … Explosively floral.
Derek Stanford, BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
Language of gods and palaces, muscular and glittering, a tough physical quality to the lines. Craggy heroic pictures.
Michelene Wandor, TIME OUT
Classical in origin, dramatic in form, and extreme, even apocalyptic, in imagery.
Geoff Page, CANBERRA TIMES
The Doom-breakers
They do appear,
Walking in tenderness, dew about them
Footprints that catapult primroses,
Snapping the stalks of justice, immoral as saints,
Never on their way to anywhere in particular,
Strolling through space, occasionally coinciding
With earth’s well-timed thousand MPH revolutions.
They do appear — you lie denying it —
Swinging from the rings of justice like gibbons,
Till Heaven’s brutal pendulum shakes with laughter,
Forgetting its metronome mark …
for a catch of breath.