Warning Light Calling: A Poetry Review
WARNING LIGHT CALLING centres around Sputnik in a long narrative poem / a novella in verse. Anti-Heroic Sputnik is a spacey young man. He finished studies in the history of ideas and Russian literature. He imagines his life in the context of Soviet culture, literature, and philosophy, while entangled in a problematic relationship with a girl called Yelena.
The composition of the narrative poem borrows from the structure and the themes of the Odyssey and the Iliad with a peppering of the Red Space Cavalry. The setting is Denmark, Aarhus. Sputnik…
I adore poetry. Condensing fiction or an idea down into often a single page gives me a sense of ancestry and philosophical substance. In poetry, we can often dive into philosophy and conceptual meaning more eagerly than fiction and maybe that’s why my first book was my Usurper Kings poetry collection.
When I got the chance to know Peter, poet-author of Warning Light Calling & Danish Northwest, it was a further reconnection with Scandinavian roots and the honouring of Hellene poetic epics. Peter’s work reimagines ancient story ideas with a dissident-soviet-style cyberpunk lens. It’s as hardcore as metal played by musicians who were trained in the classics. A love-song to COVID frustrations, interpersonal mine fields and space opera in one fluid poetry collection.
The experience of Warning Light Calling by Peter Graarup Westergaard returns me to a sense of dis-place, it’s Europe, but parallel. Distended into Sputnik’s imaginative and creatively frustrated world. The dissent is not unwelcome, nor does it fill me with dread, but adventure. I want to dive into it, experience this other-but-familiar place one only ventures into, when a poet gives their reader enough to ponder and enough to attach.
A sense of beneficial strangeness and emotional normalcy abounds in Warning Light Calling. The desperate and sometimes beset mind of Sputnik. Yelena’s commanding but supportive if sometimes distant stare. Threaded through is the frustration of the last two years, of disconnection within the realm of fictional Aarhus, and paused breath of the planet.
A tripped out, cathartic and desperate ride through dissidence, flower guns and space stations, which if we’re not careful, will eat us alive.
