ABSTRACT DREAMS TAKE FLIGHT
A collection of poetry and short stories by Manchester based award winning performance poet, Arthur Chappell. The work is extremely diverse, with poems on vampires, and poems of seduction. The title, Dreams Take Flight is a linking theme in that the author explores the boundaries between fact, escapist fantasy and realism. The closing short story, Why Should I live When Others Die is an autobiographical piece set in a fictional context as the author tries to find meaning in his life, in order to be allowed to survive an imminent plane crash. The boundaries between truth and delusion blur on many levels. In Portrait Of A Vampire Part One a vampire is driven insane by his inability to see his own reflection, and seeks artists who can paint a portrait of how he looks. The trouble is that each artist represents a different school and paints a subjective view of what they see, not what the vampire would want to see. The problem remains unsolved, until the second part of the poem when the artist turns the tables on the vampire. More realistic is ‘So Civilized And Sporting Of You Sir’, in which the man who both invented the Queensbury Rules for pair play and sportsmanship, and destroyed Oscar Wilde is put in the dock in an unusually biographical work for the verse format.
Poems here read like stories, with rhyme and a beginning, middle and end structure that makes them imminently accessible. The stories have a poetic sense of their own. A boy gets an entire universe for his birthday. A Cthulhu monster goes on a Blind Date, literally, with a blind girl, with rather sad consequences. In the poems, the author writes a verse so terrible that the world has to be destroyed to stop it from being read again. Two starts go supernova in order to embrace. An elevator operator introduces Dance Music DJ'ing into his lift in a crowded shipping mall with hilarious results, and the author’s mind and heart take each other to court. The work is available directly from the author, who has written many abstracts here, on subjects from H.G. Wells to The English Civil War. The author has a degree in Literature and philosophy, and is an active English Civil War Enthusiast. Watch out for more of his work in the near future.