Beamish Boy - Albert Flynn Desilver (Book Review)

Desilver’s jaunty little memoir, “Beamish Boy,” settles on a pleasant narrative of twilight transformations, instructed by a voice both artful and untethered; there’s a whisper of pedantry, which, when given track, is willfully apparent – cigarettes, in particular, are gruesomely bedeviled, a tiny caveat of peculiar annoyance to this reader, whose unbothered predilection for these carcinogenic delights is almost ambrosial. The small scrapings aside, this is a good, well-manicured piece of writing. Desilver “wrestles the Jabberwocky,” here a manifestation of innumerable origins; a vice-bloated German governess, a history of youthful consternation, and, most audibly, a hellish bout with alcoholism and drug use. The poet recounts, in absorbing detail, maniacal mushroom journeys and apoplectic alcoholic scramblings, narrowly avoiding a collision with the booze-hungry turnout of Bukowski, or the washy, inebriated glimpses of William S. Burroughs. I’ll drink to that.