This book is not only a powerful, hauntingly evocative literary work (prose-poem) based on a true story, but also a potential inspiration to those struggling with heroin and other addictions.
The desperate scribblings on scraps of paper and ratty notebooks by 27 year-old Robin Marchesi, a brilliant young English Oxford dropout, ultimately became an epic post-Beat era prose-poem of power and beauty. First, the troubled young man descended into the Orphic underworld of late 20th Century counter-culture (but no Eurydice). He hit his rock bottom in a Spanish Foreign Legion prison in Ceuta, North Africa, where he was held in 1979 after being apprehended in a drug deal gone wrong. After hitting bottom, he came up for light. That is the first (Part I: Los Rosales) of two journals he kept on the fly, mixing poetry and prose in an effusion of powerful feelings and ideas.
Twenty years later (1999) by an amazing irony - long free of addiction and sober, and having become a productive, respected member of London's art and literary scene - Robin Marchesi had the opportunity and the duty to fly halfway around the world to rescue a 27 year old London acquaintance who had fallen into a similar drug habit (and danger) in San Francisco's notorious Mission district (which gives Part Two its title in this journal or pair of journals).
Together, each of these scribbled journals documents a journey from darkness into light. Los Rosales refers not to the better-known Madrid neighborhood by that name, but to a rose garden tended by prisoners at the harsh Ceuta prison. Throughout this bleak journey you will find tender and refreshing moments of light as in that rose garden. The juxtaposition of dark and light elevates an already accomplished text into a work of heroic and lasting artistic and cultural value.
"When I laid eyes on the submitted ms in 1999, I immediately recognized not only a fellow poetic talent, but also a heroic, even epic, story of personal self-liberation from the nightmare of drug addiction. The prose-poetry format reminded me of the best of the earlier Beat poets like Alan Ginsberg (Howl, City Lights Press, San Francisco, 1965, intro by William Carlos Williams). It has the look and feel, the smell of rain and fog, the sweat and desperation, the danger and exhilaration, of Jack Kerouac's journeyings at certain points, and the ambience of Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The bold mix of poetry and prose also evokes a ghost of James Joyce or T. S. Eliot."John T. Cullen, poet (writing as A. T. Nager, *Postcards to My Soul* and other works), publisher of Clocktower Books.
