Black Cat in the Super Unknown by Theron Moore
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Black Cat in the Super Unknown”
Poetry
Cosmic Monolith, 2024
$10.00, 54 pages
ISBN: 979-8864567869

There’s clearly a nostalgic vibe going on in Theron Moore’s collection of eleven psychedelic poems, harking back to the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. Invoking the memory of a beloved teacher, Cliff Spaine of Northern Illinois University, and the music and movies of the era – Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Rocky Horror Picture Show and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others – Moore sets the tone of memory. In several shorter poems (“Back in the 60’s and 70’s,” “The Aardvark Theater” and “Grace Slick at Mother Blues” among them) Moore remembers a time when, as he writes in “Selling the Chicago Seed,” he was

part of the solution not
the problem 
livin’ on the fringe
why the ordinary 
seems so strange
to me

Strange, indeed, are his longer poems, “The Final Countdown,” the title poem, “Black Cat in the Super Unknown,” “An Eastern Queen,” and “The Rockford Speedway Experience ’77,” which likewise invokes the bygone era of Robert Plant, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith.

The speaker of “Black Cat in the Super Unknown” is like some ancient guide leading us on a journey through the cosmos (the super unknown), the Virgil to the reader’s Dante. The cosmos may simply be a plaything of the mysterious black cat that comes and goes over the twenty-page poem,

who walks 
in the silent hallways
of the church of Spaine
guarding secrets
of the cosmiverse
protecting god
from the ants
who build their colonies 

God, indeed, is several times described as living a lonely life of solitude, “watching ants / build colonies.” Along the way, we encounter Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, a cenotaph like the monolith from Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey, and more, until, at the end, we learn that the speaker, “floating/ down the hallways / of the church of Spaine,” is, in fact, God, “watching ants / build colonies.” Or is he? The poem ends like something out of Prufrock with the porpoises, who

wave
goodbye,
goodbye.

Moore’s psychedelic trip is not meant to provide answers, after all, only raise the questions. What is Reality, and how do we perceive it? Similarly, the final poem should likewise be read as metaphor, the relentless speeding around the racetrack close to half a century ago, a pointless circle, maybe, but driven by a persistent, unabating id fueled by desire. And always, the nostalgia comes flooding back, the excitement, the rush.

it’s the look of the cars
and bright lights
on the track 
against a black 
and starless night 
which draws you in
the sound coming from 
the cars
like smokestack lightning 
pushing these monsters 
to their limit 

Diving into the past and into the vast unknown, Theron Moore’s Black Cat in the Super Unknown is all about exceeding these limits, pushing beyond to whatever lies out there – in terms of language, image, and experience.