Bence Adok: The Great Beyond

The Champion Series

Guest Author:

Blace Alcock

Presenting the fiction of:

Bence Ádók

of The Great Beyond

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If ever there was a doomsday prophet and poet together, it would be Bence Ádók. Both classical and contemporary, he marries his poetry with a stark sense of impending doom, but it sings. Like sitting on an old cedar-rail fence and watching world war 1, nonplussed, just watching as Mother Mary emerges from the trenches and walks the length of No-Man’s land.

His publication The Great Beyond achieves its namesake. The works he publishes are otherworldly, violent and beautiful works, always surgically focusing on the primal realities around us. His work is a type of literary revival of the dramatics dominating the baroque period of arts. His work is literary chiaroscuro.

Even his prose works on a level which not a lot of writers today are able to reach. His is the tuning fork of words. Beautifully somber, unafraid to ask readers to dwell on its meaning, which have been thoughtfully layered over each other into a tidy swaddling.

And he backs up every single word he writes with precision. He knows writing. Even when he took the time and edited one of mine, I received a small essay’s worth of feedback on things he observed and interpreted, things I hadn’t even realized before. He thrives on the deep blue intricacies swelling and churning within writing and he invokes them in full, never missing and always managing to shock me with the images he conjures.

Bence Adok channels this miasmic sense of religiosity. His poem “Gomorrah” exemplifies this:

Black rolling fields bend forward

for the rain to pierce

the land that starves

moaning when sin

invades the core of the fruit

the flies eat him from within

His recent poem “Kinizi Pál” takes a step back from the apocalyptic poeticism to pay homage to the poem’s namesake, a Hungarian general who battled the Ottomans. The poem is styled similarly to greats like Beowulf or The Green Knight. Stylized with a few modern flourishes, Bence is more concerned about the myth of the man rather than the factual (oftentimes less exaggerated) events. This poem sings with the unrhythmic sounds of swords a-clatter, with just a hint of those beautiful physical metaphors which made Robert E. Howard’s descriptions of Conan ring with lyrical brutality.

As the raging rapids, the thing tottered

legs long as wizened trunks of trees,

Kinizsi surged strong as a storm from

the rolling river and approached

the great giant of fur whose bones

were bound as tough as bronze,

whose breaths were winds of Winter,

jaw agape with steaming savage hunger,

Kinizsi beheld it a titan thudding towards him.

Oil paints, that’s what Bence writes in. Thick, rich, lush, vibrant. A veritable renaissance of words steeped in classical ideas and themes. His poems are sweeping events indicative of the classical poet-playwright, sweeping assertions firmly affixed in Christian and religious imagery and ideas. I’m picky when it comes to writing. I prefer my classics. But

Bence Ádók

is one of those few writers I find myself waiting anxiously for new work to come out. He’s a gem polished when people read his work.

If you come out of this at all curious, go check out this wonderful doom-seer of a poet. And when he does decide to grace us with a novel, be sure to get a copy. Incredible writers are hard to come by, but by supporting them, they can get the recognition they deserve.

This concludes my rambling.

by

Blace Alcock