As that suggests, “Ka” is nothing if not syncretic. More than a book of stories nested in stories, it is, as the Skeleton implied, a book about Story. Dar Oakley discovers that he himself is “inside a story, which was also inside him.” The well read will pick up faint echoes and submerged allusions to, for example, Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess,” the Brazilian myths decoded by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the legendary voyages of Saint Brendan, the allegorical visions of William Blake, Native American legends, any number of bird and animal fables, striking lines from Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, and, at one point, wordplay that recalls Wallace Stevens’s famous poem about the snowman who beholds “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
In sum, “Ka” is just the kind of deeply moving, deeply personal “late work” that a great artist sometimes produces at the end of his or her career. I mustn’t, however, close without indicating something of the serene beauty of Crowley’s prose.
more here.