Even the title of this book is demanding:
from behind
comes up
scorned beauty
— though I consulted with the author, who explained that it is (at least in his opinion) read left to right, bottom to top.
The book is dedicated to Roger Woolger, but who is he? Five seconds of Internet research reveals that:
Roger J. Woolger (December 18, 1944 – November 18, 2011) was a British-American psychotherapist, lecturer, and author specializing in past life regression spirit release and shamanic healing. He was educated at the University of Oxford and King’s College London, where he gained degrees in psychology, religion, and philosophy. He then trained as an analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich.
Is this a book of poems? Perhaps not. George calls them "preverbs." I would describe them not as experimental writing but as "experimentist" writing. One could easily picture neurologists attaching experimental subjects to EEG machines, then reading them, aloud, scorned beauty/comes up/from behind.
"Each of the sentences may be read two ways," George explained to me (if I remember correctly). They have some parallels to palindromes. Let me choose, at random, five contiguous preverbs, then five of my own palindromes, for you, the objective reader, to compare:
Finding it hard to get around big mind is still going around.
Time passing means it’s harder to know I’m me.
I know speaking moving on.
You can’t help taking it personally but it soon forgets.
Still recall not knowing what anything means, the familiar is yet to come.
Neptune nut pen
Straight Fifth G.I. arts
Yacht a bath Cay?
Sun even a sane Venus
Haiti — ah!
Well, mine are shorter; that much is clear. And maybe more concrete? George is concerned with the question of identity; who is the "I"? I seem to be obsessed with the solar system.
Preverbs are not intended to "create beauty," like poems, but rather to cause beautiful mental backwash. I would call these "multi-flex formulas" (remembering the "Speidel Twist-O-Flex" watches of my youth).