THE SHADOW OF GABRIEL

FOREWORD

The Shadow of Gabriel’s Wing, Michael Bradburn-Ruster’s collection of poetry, makes me think of French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau’s painting, ‘Embarkation for Cythera.’ It is an invitation to travel through history and mythology, dreams and fantasy, soul and love. The Notes at the end of the volume reveal the acuity of the research that the poet completed while composing his pieces of creative work. There, Michael reveals that he is all at once an historian and a theologian, a phenomenologist and an archaeologist.

But above all, he is a magnificent poet. Rhythm and musicality, silences and echoes, guide us through the labyrinth of his artisanal, luminous verses, as Ariadne’s thread guided Theseus on his way back, after having killed the Minotaur. ‘Darkness sings,’ writes the poet. Maybe so ; nevertheless, the moon enlightens shadowy territories, as it does in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, ‘Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon’ (1824), with which the poet chose to adorn his book’s front cover. References to German Romanticism are evident throughout the book, in currents of wit, humour, and the adulation of beauty. Bradburn-Ruster’s poetry furthermore reminds me of Friedrich Hölderlin’s, so much influenced by Ancient Greek poets Alcaeus and Asclepiades of Samos, and Novalis’, another German Romantic poet he quotes to qualify his own poetry : ‘The communion between the finite and the infinite.’

By many aspects, Michael Bradburn-Ruster, a mature man and poet, is ‘The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ (1817), as depicted in another of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. In our terrible days of Covid-19 pandemic, Michael Bradburn-Ruster examplifies ‘The Function of the Poet’, as defined by French poet Victor Hugo in 1830 : ‘In such times gone awry, from far / The poet brings tidings of better days.’

ALAIN SAINT-SAËNS
Poet and Literary Critic,
Corresponding Member,
Academy of Letters, Bahia, Brazil