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"The Clock Had Not Yet Struck Her Prettiest Distance" is a collection of three surrealist poetry books by Dale M. Houstman. Each book differs in source material, form, and emotional ambiance... "The Starlit Dog: and Other Tales" an illustrated book with texts inspired by fairy tales, that dark fountain of psychological matter; "Enfleurage" composed by utilizing pulp detective texts, and itself divided into three parts; "Calcutta Orchids" a series of minimalist poems imbued with a mytho-poetic atmosphere, a sensation of place. These three books were created in 2007, 2001, and 1991 respectively, as the book moves backward in terms of initiation, headed for a wellspring. Although these three sections differ by way of their variety of settings and tones, their unifying force is founded in Surrealism - the philosophy of liberated imagination - and also in a 'making' free of obligatory and arbitrary strictures. Surrealism is not - and never will be - a literary style, a toolbox of "proven" techniques, nor a fatuous machine of self-expression. Yet the work does not lie beyond comprehension or pleasure, even as it refuses the anchor of comforting paraphrase, which can only offer up a reassuring "meaning" while discarding the poetry, now rendered obsolete by exegesis, or - more precisely - by the egoistic projection of opinion. Another discernible and unifying quality of the three books is the prevalence of whimsical and childlike elements scattered throughout, having blossomed from a consciousness enriched by such artists as Lewis Carroll, Arthur Rimbaud, e.e. cummings, Benjamin Peret, and Alfred Jarry, as well as from fairy tales, science fiction, comic books, a persistent resistance to the mundane, and a yearning for a revolution of consciousness, in which there is no separation between the intended and the accidental.
