The Basement Trains (a 21st century poem)
Publisher: ModeRoom Press
Published: November 20, 2006
Language: eng; fre
Number of pages: 48
ISBN-13: 9780615135762
Description: The poem begins in ‘an ancient garden in the midnight city,’ where a nocturnal recollection of the past begins an epic voyage traversing centuries of ideas and continents of profound imagery.
 
“The Basement Trains,” Payne’s greatest long prose poem, written when he was 28 years old, conjures up a wealth of poetic legacies: from Dante’s visit to the underworld, to TS Eliot’s ‘Mind of Europe.’ Here, one sees William Blake, Milton, the Catholic Bible, Greek and Roman myth, Russian folklore; and, beyond this, one hears the voice of Roman Payne in its purest poetic form.