Bruce Rimell

A man sits on a Cretan beach, staring out to sea, musing on the trackways of his life, thoughts moving timelessly as waves break upon the warm sands. "...another wave rolls its crash to un its fold / another thought stirs, rises to crescendo, sings out, falls..." This is 'Afterimages', simultaneously a deeply self-referential and abstracted text exploring the Janus-like perspectives of middle age, an elegiac reverie of all the people the poet used to be as he has wandered from one life to another, and a creative plunging into fragments of Greek mythology. "...fifty is midlife and I often feel like dying, / or like I am dying falling through time..." A text filled with questions that bubble up when a forward-looking Queer, ADHD artist and poet comes to a point where time starts to draw him backwards, where he sighs with the movements of the sea, where he dreams the murmuring closures of Glaucos drowning in the honey pot at Knossos. "...this too is mystes, an unwinding of sorts, / into which you must immolate: sacrifice yourself / into the sweetness..."

A dark, brutally honest, and sometimes sordid voyage, written with a wired, savage voice, into the promiscuous heart of a gay/Queer and hyperactive/ADHD outsider who has internalised a world of pain, but still finds himself, standing, still surviving. "don't freak if this all goes horribly wrong: it's fine..." Trigger warnings run their gauntlets everywhere, but there are moments of beauty and sorrow, which is beauty in another guise. "don't see my eagerness, my tears, or if my eyes blank: it's fine..." Not for the faint-hearted perhaps, this collection jumps frenetically from elegiac tributes for queer heroes to self-destructive sexual acts in a kind of shadowy no-place and no-time, confronting casual encounters, abuse and queerphobic hate towards a poetic self attempting to act as an antenna for Queer suffering everywhere. "don't stop: I'll be your willing sacrifice..."

Iceland is often labelled 'a land of ice and fire' - these days it has become something of a clich - but when artist and poet Bruce Rimell visited with his husband in 2023, he felt plunged into a world of blood and honey, a place of poetry and song, recalling the Old Norse mythic images, as well as the magma which underlies and sculpts the vistas of this volcanic country... "to which I will say: I am a poet, I pray to waterfalls, let it outpour like rain..." Simultaneously a journey through Iceland's natural, cultural and human landscapes, as well as a dreaming fall into the frenetic soul of a hyperactive poet, 'Bloodhoney Songs' takes in scenes from Reykjavik, ekphrastic verses springing from Icelandic music - from Bj rk to m m, Sigur Rόs to lafur Arnalds - and geological wonders, to evoke a sublime process of emergence from lifelong traumas as a Queer/ADHD person into a more hopeful place... "breathe out: you are coming to an end of your grief, a closing of time..." Moving from the waking world, through fractured dreams of love in Loki's arms, into an eternal moment of stillness - the beginning of a fragile new world - this unique outsider's view of Iceland is possibly the most unusual perspective on the country and its fascinating people you've ever read

Artist and poet Bruce Rimell brings another strange and colourful poetic travelogue, springing from eight inspiring days and nights on the Greek island of Milos in the Cyclades... "everything is touched by fingers of gales, all's in motion: sea, air, land shivers" ...walking through a volcanic terrain buffeted by strong winds from the tail end of an Aegean storm, with his perception transformed by calls for the return of the world famous 'Venus de Milo' - more properly 'Aphrodite of Milos' - back to her home island, the sight of her in the mountains... "hey Paris... Aphrodite wants to go home" ...as if Aphrodite herself was whispering in the breezes, her truest melody, feeling her way into the poet's heart, his words, his dreams... "I've been hearing her voice, the one who smiles, who persuades into the human heart, and mine so easily opened, so swayed by heaven on earth, and shadows" ...these verse notes are echoes, fragments of a song, as much from Aphrodite as for her, as well as an elegy to a unique and stunning island landscape... "ask how and why all day and all night upon the Melian isle..."

"...everyone's got something to say with your mouth, even me..." A hyperactive, idiosyncratic and deeply personal journey into the mercurial Welsh poet-prophet figure of Taliesin, framed as a magical pilgrimage around Llyn Geirionydd in North Wales, evoking the lake and its waters as the bard's own cauldron from which he continually emerges in different historical, mythical and fictional guises ... "sometimes dreams are wiser than the waking..." Unfolding layers of meaning from the protohistorical cynfardd of the Old North to the 'radiant brow' of medieval legend, as well as Taliesin's contemporary significance and links with other cultures, this crazed, garrulous exploration runs through the archetypal Celtic poet's hall of mirrors with eccentric wit and blazing energy ... "stand behind the cataract unbound, close my eyes: hear me, I speak..." Culminating in a wildly subjective, underwater encounter with Taloiastinos and the watis, two timeless and interrelated forerunners of the Taliesin mythos, and a forested fall into the mindset of the visionary poet who experiences no separation between self and other, this book is likely to be one of the most riddling, esoteric and obscure treatments of Taliesin ever released "I am one who waits, says, I am one who watches, says, I am one who wanders off away, says..."

What do you do when life seems overwhelming, the world seems alienating and physical injury has become debilitating? For artist and poet Bruce Rimell, the answer was to turn away from the world, and to seek solace in landscape, astronomy and poetry. Written over a period of four years, 'Wanderer: Songs of Solitude, Fragility, and Change' emerged from this challenging time: the poetry addresses grief and memory, as well as slow-burn changes in the course of a human life. It mourns the passing of a once-cherished friendship, stands in sorrow before waterfalls, celebrates the passing of the seasons visible in the natural world. Framed as a journey across the heavens, the collection is interspersed with deeply personal, and idiosyncratic, hymns to various planets and stars, before returning home to Earth. 'Wanderer...' takes in diverse shifts in identity and lifelong movements through walks in moorlands and the wilds, as well as dreams, otherworldly encounters at secluded falls, and the night sky, all sprung from a somewhat hyperactive perspective. A free verse diary of some dark and difficult days punctuated with shards of light, 'Wanderer' takes the reader through a time of lost illusions, but a magical journey nonetheless. Sometimes, sorrow is as beautiful as joy: this collection seeks out exactly that kind of beauty.

In summer 2022, poet and artist Bruce Rimell visited the Coasts of Antrim, Northern Ireland. After a lifetime reading Irish mythology, and wandering that ancient landscape in his mind for years, this was the first time he had set foot on the physical island itself. Unsurprisingly, his imagination caught fire, and 'Beeley far The North' is the result. Framed as a picaresque jaunt around the region of Ballycastle, taking in notable legends and landmarks from around the town as well as Rathlin Island, this eccentric narrative poem takes as its primary inspiration the Middle Irish tale 'Buile Suibhne', or, in Seamus Heaney's translation 'Sweeney Astray'. Rather than retell this tragic story of this frenzied and cursed figure, half wildman half broken bird, through a different perspective, however, Bruce chose to take poor Suibhne's madness as a character to inhabit, eyes through which to experience this part of Ireland in a madcap way which mirrored the rapid "seven days, eight nights" of his sojourn there. In doing this, he has also tentatively begun to forge something of a new, unconventional, and hopefully unique, approach to psychogeography, which he has playfully termed the beeley. Oddly unorthodox but always vibrant in tone, 'Beeley Far The North' is an experiment in trying to speak of the human dynamics of landscape in a fresh and hyperactive way.

A nameless young man finds himself wandering half-naked through the frozen wintry Bristol night, when he falls - or is he pushed...? - into the river and is washed out to sea. Arriving lost and exhausted upon a strange island enmisted, he comes to a fortress which holds a lithe, enchanted-but-broken, eternal youth in chains, who tries to kill him. It is only through sharing stories of his life that he is able to avert the youth's wrath at being disturbed, easing his traumatised heart by offering him something no other visitor to this dark place has ever given him: presence, and care. This unearthly mythical narrative becomes the poetic frame story by which Bruce, the nameless wanderer, unfolds his life story in fractured, allegorical and dreamlike ways. We move from migraines and his lived experience as a gay/queer person with ADHD, into visionary experiences that changed the course of his life, the ecstasies of true love, and expressions of his personal philosophies and spiritualities, as well as a curious catalogue of artworks he has created over the years as an artist. As this most unusual of autobiographies unfolds, we move deeper into Bruce's queer/neurodiverse, homoerotic/hyperactive inner world, gliding from one theme to another in a genre-baffling, lilting symphony of images, ultimately uncovering his one true mirror soul with all its fragilities, strengths and wonders. He must try to save his own life as well as the youth's, so they can escape this otherworldly prison together. At once melodious and magic, joyous and tragic, 'Nine Nights Awake' is not for the faint of heart: simultaneously riddlingly absurd, sexually graphic and brutally honest, its mythical wildness might well be the oddest and most eccentric memoir you are ever likely to read

In 2021, British artist Bruce Rimell realised that he had also been a poet for much longer than he had been an artist, and decided to bring this other creative practice into the foreground. Delving through his many collections of poetry, he began to publish the best as part of a small series of books. However, some of his unpublished collections were of much lower quality, yet contained within them what he felt were occasional shards of beautiful light. He decided to gather these disparate poems into a single volume of assorted works. This retrospective book is the result, mapping the transformations of Bruce's poetic voice over nearly thirty years, from formative and youthful compositions into the confident, eclectic, and eccentric poet with a mythical edge that he is now. The diverse collection ranges from satirical to magical, playful to visionary. Longform psychedelic texts sit alongside quick bursts of poetic inspiration, while poems which accompanied artworks, along with random social media compositions, all add their unique voices to the throng of the anthology. 'Reveries, Dreams, Refractions' is an unconventional volume charting a across decades of a poet's inner life. Come and see...

In the late 1990s, artist and poet Bruce Rimell travelled halfway across the world to live and work in Japan. There in his new home city of Uji, just south of Kyoto, he discovered a wonderful new world of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, as well as evocative myths and folktales, beautiful rivers and forested mountains. Losing himself in this ancient landscape, where the Uji River emerges from the mountains into a picturesque cultural scene, he soon discovered the traditional Japanese artform of the tanka, and he began writing these brief poems to reflect upon his emotional life, and to note his personal impressions of the historical region in which he lived. After two years in the country, he decided to return home to Britain, initiating a transformative period in his life. The tanka struck him as an appropriate way to record these changes, particularly as the medium commonly evokes traditional Japanese cultural ideas of impermanence, transience and the fleeting nature of moments in time. As he departed from Japan, and settled back slowly into British life, he mused upon sorrows of a life left behind, impressions of natural beauty and failed love affairs, all of which are enfolded into a collection of poems - in Japanese, but with English translations and notes - that represents an emotionally sensitive work of memory, of reminiscence, and of mono no aware, the 'sigh of things', the delicate knowledge that everything in this fleeting, floating world eventually fades and passes away.

White Book is a strange and beautiful visionary and mystical text: "Could I not be a Quiet Man? / Could I not be a Speaker of these Words? / Laughing, crying, I hear these Words / I hear the answer: The time is now / It is always now / And when I knew this truly / To the depth of my soul / I became human / And I took of the vision / The Vision of the New Year..."

The use of psychedelic drugs plants is rising, and with it the number of reports narrating encounters with otherworldly visionary beings. Approaches to these experiences have often been literal, archetypal or dismissive. Evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion suggest innate and non-imagistic mental foundations for these phenomena arising from easily-triggered evolutionary functions during emotive periods of high cognitive demand. Such functions include agent detection, social intelligence faculties and metacognition. This wide-ranging book explores how our deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in supernatural agents, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become present when psychedelic drugs and plants are ingested. Bruce concludes that visionary beings shimmer within as awe-inspiring products of the mind, an experience which rests at the heart of what it is to be human.

The alleged 'death' of painting has shaped the recent course of art, but the model of the human mind upon which it rests is no longer considered accurate. Cognitive science has shown that the mind is not a blank slate but content-rich, and as such humans bear an array of innate expectations of reality and non-reality, which apply to painting as well as other human behaviours such as religion or music. This creative thesis takes in a series of case studies tracing the prehistory of painting in light of these cognitive propensities, from the beginnings of human culture, to Bushman rock art and the experiences of painters today, to uncover a perennial function for painting which cannot die: the ubiquitous sensation of an 'otherworld' beyond the canvas or rock face. This approach to painting demands its rehabilitation as a humanising self-expression in a world increasingly estranged from art, abandoning artistic ideology in favour of an image-based communion with human nature.

Visionary and religious experiences are ubiquitous among human beings, but why do we experience them as coming from a hidden reality beyond the senses? Why should we believe in the existence of deities despite the mundane evidence of our own eyes? Why do we as intelligent primates ascribe any importance to these 'imaginary' realities at all? This creative and speculative thesis seeks to answer these questions in a new way, gazing into the content of visions themselves and exploring the various inner realities that gave rise to these transformative and meaningful aspects of our humanity. Focusing upon symbolic cognition as a fundamental organising principle of human experience, a diverse series of musings upon the nature of reality, consciousness, and our evolutionary origins seeks to transcend our modern artificial boundaries to arrive at a holistic, and delightfully playful, human image for the twenty-first century. An original visionary thesis illustrated with 30 beautiful drawings.

A visionary and artistic exploration through the greatest of the Mystery traditions of Antiquity, 'Eleusis' follows the winding path that leads from the kidnap of Persephone and Demeter's grief at her loss to the transformation of mankind through the Epiphany of an Ineffable Female Godhead. Drawing from several years of mythological, experiential and visionary research, and delightfully enfolded with 25 colour and monochrome art images, Bruce attempts to move beyond the Eleusinian veil of secrecy to enter into the very Heart of the Mystery. A final illustrated essay also explores the meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries for the modern day.

Playful, archaic and confusing, this illustrated collection of bizarre song-chant poems narrates in riddling language the story of Minver, a flashing-eyed sprite who became for the author the very embodiment of ecstasy. Emerging from the dance club culture of the late 90s, but set in an archetypal landscape, Minver Stories is a deeply idionsyncratic take on psychedelic experience. Delightfully designed with 20 illustrations and commentaries.