The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith

A Sparkling Reissue of "The Last Oblivion"

I’ve just received my copy of The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastical Poems of Clark Ashton Smith. As an owner of Smith’s Complete Poems and Translations (along with Penguin’s
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, plus Donald Sidney-Fryer’s annotated The Hashish-Eater), I never can make up my mind whether Smith is greater as poet or as prose fantasist. What I do feel is that The Last Oblivion represents him at his poetic best, as a bard of the Fantastic giving his imagination free rein, creating new cosmic and daemonic realms to investigate, rarely succumbing to the overworked conceit, “I dreamed a dream.”

Yet I must partly retract that last reservation even as I speak it: Smith the dreamer, from the time of his youthful Star-Treader, is merely laying claim to the visionary’s privilege of seeing, prophesying the wildest, most far-fetched of surrealities into being. (Does this trait not align him with such prophets as John of Revelations?) He is often quite prescient: who doesn’t notice, in his “Ode to the Abyss,” the uncanny prefiguration of as-yet-undiscovered black holes, lurking in wait to siphon the sturdiest materials of entire galaxies?

In most of these poems, he rushes in where devils fear to tread, with utter unconcern for ordinary plausibility, and this makes his fantasies all the more oddly credible.
We get “The Hashish-Eater,” the Odes on the Abyss, on Oblivion, or on Light itself; the dramatic monologue “Nero,” which burns even as it scorns the fiddle; a wealth of phantasmagorical sonnets on Medusa, on mummies and ghouls, and many other witcheries.

Reading these accomplished verses, we are reminded of Smith’s disdain for the merely “utile” in literature, and this hauteur, brilliantly exemplified, makes the poems all the more useful. Even the archaisms are weirdly apropos for the far dominions under those double suns, or expired suns, which are Smith’s province: when we read, for instance, the noun-straddling Miltonic adjectives like those in “Memnon at Midnight” (“Beneath the star-borne canopy extreme”), we are whisked into perversely scented atmospheres in which extraterrestrial murk and miasma play about ruined citadels where all that survives of vanished, perhaps inhuman races, is a litter of broken stones chiseled with indecipherable runic inscriptions portentous as anything in Paradise Lost.

As before, this second edition comes expertly edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz;
the larger, less compact version somehow fits the reader’s hand more comfortably (I can compare, having had the first edition, now sequestered from access due to pandemic restrictions at school). It’s great to have an artwork by CAS himself on the front cover; now, behold how designer Dan Sauer has darkened and empurpled that same artwork on the back cover, as befits the crepuscular zones in which Smith’s hippogriffs and Gorgons can most comfortably, stealthily hunt the human prey luckless enough to alight on their worlds.

--Tom Goff