“Garebian skillfully foregounds a deep sense of longing throughout the three major units of his collection: in the opening "Prologue" section with a piece entittled "Five Versions of His Night With Gavin," for instance, where in its "Penultimate Version" we encounter desire set in your heart/like a blue/stone in a secret ring"; then, later in the middle section's "The Corpus," where the much longer "Caravaggio"'s ninth lyric entitled "Blue Is Poison" presents us with a similar "desire for cunning/thought, without overlooking/what you find in blue/inside your head, inside your heart,/purposively absorbed"; until finally, in the concluding "Blue" section, a poem like "In Water and In Dream" foreground the colour blue appropriately as "nothing more/than a desire to mirror you/in chaos and ecstasy, no/more than a beginning, desire/a journey into the unfamiliar?"

Garebian is perhaps right here to interrogate Jarman's filmic and literary artistry as a journey into the "unfamiliar." For as Judith Butler reminds us (following Walter Benjmain's Freudian lead in his The origin of German Tragic Drama [1985]), melancholy "sustains a loyalty to the world of things that transfixes the melancholic in a motionless gaze" (in her "Afterword" to Loss, emphasis added). That fastidious dedication to the quotidian undoubtedly explains Jarman's own mesmerized attraction to the baroque Italian painter Caravaggio in his Turner Prize-nominated film by that name in 1986. As Garebian depicts this fixation so coordinate with Jarman's own film-making in a "Caravaggio" sequence of poems (from "The Corpus" section): "Everything painted from life--boy peeling figs/lute player tuning his instrument,/water carafe with dew-petalled roses---/no ideology but the beauty of created things." Garebian finds this passion for wordly things even more boldly foregrounded in Jarman's excessively violent yet campy adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II filmed in 1991 as Jarman's camera, in the poem entitled "Edward II: A Queer History" (again from "The Corpus"), follows "[King Edward's] eyes [as they] move along surfaces/of strange and ordinary things,/learning from what is and waht is not . . . watching truth/blur our of . . . unexpected harzards of fact." And it is that very thingly passion that informs so much of Jarman's last and most autobiographical film entitled Blue from 1993; hence, in Garebian's poem "Desire and Illness" (from "Blue" in section three): "Your method of knowing/is to touch carnal geography./To know entropy/in its flesh, carrion/collapse and the dread of unending nightmare."

Nonetheless, Jarman's art is not at all an argument for painterly or documentary mimesis. That would reduce it to the closure of mere representation, and turn Garebian's own significant achievement.”

— David Jarraway

“Biographies can be wonderful to read, but many can be quite dry, as if the author is simply laying out the facts of their subject's life and making a detailed prose chronology. They start from birth and continue to death. Yawn. They can be pretty dull. That's the same thing I find about 'bio-pics,' but that's another topic altogether. Who needs all that linearity in this modern world? Not Derek Jarman, that's for sure. He hated convention. What I find refreshing about Keith Garebian's Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems is that upon reading this volume, one gets the sense of Jarman's life without getting bogged down in detail. It is the sort of biography that suits a man whose life was centered on art and sex—'sex and glitter/stretching from bed to bed,'—and who doesn't like a bit of sex to liven up their poetry? Jarman was the director of the controversial films Caravaggio and The Last of England and was the filmmaker who shunned convention. Blue shows us glimpses of this complex and fascinating man to whom: 'Seductions were easy games/in a plurality of lovers,/but love as lonely as a man/going from drink to drink.' Jarman, an active supporter of gay rights, reveled in his homosexuality ('Being queer is a passion/in itself, a hive/of bees preparing/to die for honey') and much of Blue is focused on his extremely active sex life. It also hints at the difficulties of being an out gay man in Thatcher's England. 'Pasolini murdered by the repeated/wheels of a car while you/dodge bricks thrown by joy-riders./The world's badge of manliness/bash and speed off.' Blue is an enjoyable and engaging book of poems that will have you rushing out to your indie movie store to rent some of Jarman¹s unique and fascinating films.”

— Broken Pencil

“It is a cliche to say that what we fall in love with about our lovers is the reflection of ourselves in them, but this recognition serves as the basis for meaning in Keith Garebian's Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems. The jacket copy describes Blue as a 'book-length portrait of a filmmaker, visual artist, poet, sexual rebel and gardener who double-dared the conventions of art, desire, and filmmaking itself.' And in a sense this blurb describes the book accurately: Garebian explores all these topics through the story of Derek Jarman, with a special emphasis on sexuality. But it also misses the book's most interesting accomplishment: the reflection of the speaker, and to some extent the audience, in Jarman's portrait. Addressed entirely in the second person, Garebian's virtuoso trick is to only once or twice in the entire collection slip into a description of Jarman's desires not expressed through action. It is perhaps another cliche to say a writer ought to 'show' rather than 'tell,' but in this case the distinction is critical. Second-person poems run two common risks: the first is to be assumed as a mask for the speaker or implied author, simply a deflection of the first person, and the second is to be heard as directional, as if the 'you' in the poem is meant to be the reader. In Garebian's book, the second person is so clearly directed at Jarman that it avoids this latter fate easily. But the greater accomplishment comes from his ability to avoid a conflation between Jarman the character and Garebian's implied author by observing even Jarman's thoughts and insights as actions. Take this passage for example from the long poem 'Caravaggio':

Your eyes picked
the lock of history
with agonized tenderness
and new exigencies for art:
Jesus as a naked boy,
Sebastian's death by contempt—
tension between subject
and the way it is shown—

Garebian's skill comes in the activation of the eyes; with this choice he creates the illusion of observed fact rather than speculation and authorial commentary. The 'tension' then between Garebian's sub-ject and the way it is shown has everything to do with the illusion of autonomy he creates for Jarman, the character, from author and reader alike.”

— Matt Rader Event

“With stark, powerful phrasing reminiscent of beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Keith Garebian's recent collection of poems chronicles the life of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. Swiftly and skillfully this intriguing pathologizing tone becomes a beautiful and evocative tribute derived from the third-person perspective of a gay Canadian poet toward the prolific career of a gay British artist.

Jarman's work gained notoriety within the margins of the mainstream but never lost its alternative edge evident in the super-8 films he was known for during his early career. Garebian's poetic take on Jarman's life riffs on a variety of influences and inspirations ranging from Tony Peake's biography to a near cinematic variation on an erotic encounter. In a brilliant succession of diverse imagery "Five Versions of His Night with Gavin" culminates in a final stanza fraught deliciously with Garebian's talent for describing intense sexual play. "Dry-fucking the boy next to you caused pain to pearl/ The back of ferns, peers/ To savage the two of you like rabid dogs/ And the sky to fall."

Graced by degrees of subtle allusions to other works, Garebian's poetry is, at times, reminiscent of Adrienne Rich's love poetry and Ginsberg's call to America during intense political moments. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"--Ginsberg's first-person plea from Howl resonates in Garebian's opening pages as he draws directly from the iconic phrasing of the famed beat poet's masterpiece.

Garebian's romantic alliterative play, coupled with specifically gay male encounters and passages devoted to Jarman's films, moves this collection beyond beautiful gestures and into a powerful and highly original space regarding Canadian gay male poetry as it embraces international subjects. Recently included in Seminal, the Arsenal Pulp Press edition of gay male poetry in Canada, Garebian's work both defies and defines an important poetic canon as he moves through the life of another artist, within another medium, striving for beauty and excellence within a marginalized form, yet simulataneously reaching out toward a world of experience.”

— David Bateman Xtra!

““Graced by degrees of subtle citation...powerful and highly original...””

— The Gay and Lesbian Review, January-February 2009