The poems that Catullus wrote are replete with classical allusion and a dizzying variety of metrical schemes: Sapphics, choliambics, trimesters, glyconics and Catullus's favourite, the Phalaecian hendecasyllable, an echo of which survives in the sixteenth-century Poulter's measure. The issue for any poet translating Catullus is to produce versions which imitate this abundance. Pilling's strategy is to create versions which rhyme. He has successfully captured the verve of the longer poems and the wit of Catullus, even in the shorter obscene squibs. Catullus wrote before distinctions were made between serious and light verse. So what we have is a complete mixture, arranged according to metrical schemes possibly two centuries after Catullus's death.
The manuscript was found in the thirteenth century being used as a wedge for a wine barrel. Two copies were made before the original disappeared. Pilling retains the copy order of the poems as they appear in the original manuscript. There are 116 poems, and Pilling has translated all of them except numbers XVIII to XX, which are of doubtful provenance. He has also provided translations of alternative versions of poems that Catullus wrote.
Pilling's versions of the longer poems are tours de force of rhythm. LXIII is the only surviving example of galliambics, a metre specific to hymns by devotees of the cult of Cybele who often castrated themselves. Peter Whigham, in his Penguin Classics versions of 1966, hazards a guess that the poem is the result of Catullus's anxiety, induced by his exertions with a mistress more highly sexed than himself. Her house backed on to the temple of Cybele. Pilling's version is equally headlong in rhythm, and his cunning location of a pronoun indicating the change of gender still creates a shock in the reader: pricked by staring madness, he plucked / his genitals down and, with the sharpest flint, / sliced them off. Sense of manhood gone, She, /.
LXIV shows Catullus in almost Ashbery-like mode. Once again, Pilling does not fail to replicate the rapid jump-cutting from mythical scene to mythical scene. He is good on detail: No-one works the land, the bullocks go soft / about the neck. The version of Lesbia's sparrow (poem II) employs short, closely rhymed lines, and is wholly successful. The temptation of plangency is held at a distance, with a colloquial playfulness which nevertheless allows desire and a delicate eroticism to emerge: you perch in state / between her breasts / or in her lap - / lovely nests / these, where all you need's on tap -
Catullus's obscenity probably troubles few readers these days. Sometimes he is obviously satirical, as in XXXVI: You're dunderheaded as a blunderbuss, / long-winded as the fart of some petomaniac, / coarse as a Lesbian jest. Elsewhere Catullus admits writing to rev up somebody's motor, as in XVI: Not just for rousing boys but to set / bearded men dreaming they're stiff / - not with age - but lust, /
Pilling is certainly highly inventive with the more elaborate insults. Where he falls short, probably due to his age, is in the pithier lines. A trawl through the banter on the more relaxed sports blogs might have yielded a less strenuous vocabulary to achieve the short, sharp probrum. Certainly Catullus would be there exchanging insults with relish. It would be salutary to see versions of Catullus's shorter poems in gangsta rap.
Poets are backward beings / said Nietzsche / a bridge to past epochs, writes Sylva Fischerová in The Swing in the Middle of Chaos, a new translation of her selected poems in collaboration with Stuart Friebert. The forthright spirit shown in the opening lines of 'Butterfly Museum' is maintained from the first poem to the last: Inventing metaphors / is my best art, / wrapping up the world with words / for not to fall. / This is a poetry haunted by religion and notions of sin, yet determined to fly above with grace in all senses of the word, and perhaps even be translated in the old sense of moving from earth to heaven.
The selected poems are divided into three sections although, apart from giving the reader three digestible chunks, it is difficult to discern how the sections differ from one another in either content or form. They certainly don't match the number of her original collections in Czech. Not that this detracts from the work. Every poem has a breathtaking range of metaphor and simile which mixes allusions to history, religion and fairy-tale, even when she treats such well-worn themes as Time, so that The Holy Virgin in the buffet / hands out the pictures of saints / and serves pea soup and beer. /
The abundance of imagery sometimes comes perilously close to a mixing of metaphors: boredom drops like bonbons, / blood-red like beets. For all that, Fischerová's images develop or, better, unfold with a compelling emotional logic. There is a significant store of reference to chess and mathematics, for example, in 'The Blind': There's a chessboard with / the pieces refigured , / the king's a bishop, / the queen a rook; and then again in 'We Don't Know the Shape of Feelings': The triangle of hate / the circle of love / the square of hate … Some images are ravishing in themselves, as in 'A Beach in Nabeul, Africa': Seaweed on the beach / looks like chocolate fettucine.
Fischerová alludes to Ján Hus, Protestantism and the notion of predestination. She herself seems to be positioned in relation to the predominant Catholicism of the Czech Republic. In 'Thirty-fifth Birthday' she writes and my heart's the bell of a cloister / in the hour between two masses. In 'Like Everybody' she declares that Like everybody, I'm just / a demon preparing her own / destruction: / building a house / bricked up with plans, memories and wind, /.
There is a certain resignation here, picked up again in 'Warm Evening in May': Where have the children run off to? / And will they, as we did, / want to turn adult just like that, / drink coffee, smoke in the morning, / and sleep in bus stations, /. There is a firm grasp of the real too in 'Language is a Foreign Word': Who said there's no connection / between language and the world? But in many of the poems it's as though behind the dazzling imagery there is a fear that life might just be very ordinary, and lead to the one conclusion: What's the thing / that comes in through windows / and doors/ and grows more and more?
Fischerová's most successful poems evoke childhood. The title poem of the selection has the figure of a child on a swing, poised there, in the middle of chaos. Fischerová seems to be attempting to resolve difficult issues involving memory, death and language: In the kitchen, there's bread and butter / with mustard. / Where childhood lives. / It's not me. Someone else / used to go to the fridge / to taste the caviar. Here the imagery becomes simple, and syntax matches a complexity of feeling that the more dazzling passages do not. One feels that her future work will be soberer, but more emotionally profound.
Cheryl Follon's Dirty Looks inhabits both Fischerová's universe of metaphors and the demi-monde of Catullus. Some of her poems would probably have the Catullus of Whigham's interpretation casting a nervous eye at Cybele's temple. Follon blurs the distinction between the human and the non-human in a rip-roaring manner. Carnival, cooking and sex are the occasions of her poems, and she may well have read the poems of Radmila Lazic, whose versions by Charles Simic are also published by Bloodaxe. Lazic's poems are famously explicit over the ecstasies and anguish of sexual love, and a similar frankness is central to Follon's poems. However, in Lazic's work there is always the sense that there is a significant other who is being addressed or traduced. In Follon's poems there is an atmosphere of those girls in the city enjoying a julep or three and, somewhere in the background, a cauldron which sometimes gives off odours not to be found in the average kitchen, as in 'A Love Potion Concocted Together With Leaves', snip-snip the Seven Sisters' rose / like it was the littlest toe / of your lover in bed. And, from 'Terrible Bread', It's moistened up with sugar and wine. / Girls rub it between their legs / and give it to the one they love. / It's very powerful stuff.
I bet it is!
It is still a chastening experience to read these poems, which have so much fun with men, and the thing that makes them men. 'Auntie's Snaps' is perhaps the most entertaining of these, and it is aimed perhaps at those occasions when a maiden aunt produces photograph albums full of endless snaps of her past life. In this case the photographs of those 'nice young men' who disappeared off to Canada or Australia are replaced by those of a most prominent feature depicted with a series of similes, ending up with one copious weapon that requires thirty sheets of blowsy napkin / to mop off your hands and face.
Follon has a tendency towards the list poem, and in 'Carnival from Davies Window', derived from the nursery song 'The animals came in two by two', the poem takes us into the heart of the louche and unforeseen. Others, though, seem simply decorative, and lack the ferocious impetus of Fischerová at her best. Yet the very last poem of the collection, 'Things You Didn't Know, But You Did' is of an entirely different nature. The playful eroticism falls away and it is replaced with a disquieting violence. Edwin Muir's 'The Combat' comes to mind. This time the combatants are human and they are equally, fatefully matched so that the fight continues till we both fell down / face to face in the dust / a slight breeze working over us. If this poem indicates Follon's future manner, she could become a formidable poet.
At the level of mere appetite, the difference between Cheryl Follon's poems and those of Helen Ivory in The Breakfast Machine is the difference between a gourmand and a gourmet. Instead of superabundance, there is careful selection and, in contrast with both Follon and Fischerová, who wear their desires and their sense of sin on their sleeves, Ivory is careful to permit only a glimpse of the Garden of Earthly Delights. There is a connection with Fischerová in this collection as Ivory is an admirer of the Czech animator, Ján Švankmajer, as well as common reference points with fairy tale, and a phantasmagoric transformation of everyday realities. In the poem, 'Prague, the Kafka Café', a Czech restaurant all too common twenty years ago, is brought back to slovenly life even down to the indifference of the waitress and the cold potato soup. As in other poems, Ivory confines realism to one or two telling details within walls made of smoke / ceiling not there, / save the weight of the floor above.
Whereas Follon and Fischerová's language sets off and takes us to places we might never think of going, Ivory brings the strange places to us. She is a visually precise poet, with the gift of creating stunning images with an economy of means and sometimes, it has to be observed, an economy of punctuation. Švankmajer's animations arise from the Czechoslovak puppet theatre tradition, often a refuge for dissident dramatists, with subtly horrific figures such as a doll with the top of its head removed like the top of a boiled egg. The opening poem in the collection, 'The End of the Pier Show' features a deadpan reaction to a rapturous burst of music from a million songbirds / bled into the fusty air of the theatre / where three rows from the back / a little girl stood up, put down her doll. In the very next poem, 'The Dolls House', something mysterious and unpleasant happens to a doll rather in the manner of an M.R. James story: But there is a shifting of furniture / in the dolls house tonight, / a slow dragging of objects / across candle-lit rooms. Perhaps some truly wicked descendants of Beatrix Potter's 'Two Bad Mice' have been at work here.
Ivory uses very simple verse forms, usually matching a complete phrase to a line. In her previous collection, The Dog in the Sky, she experimented with sestina, villanelle and sonnet forms, and the requirement for rhyme sometimes resulted in an uncomfortable enjambment blurring the precision of her images. In this, her third collection, she has dispensed with an anxiety for conventional form, and allowed her images full rein as in 'Cypher': This is pure language, / played from frame to frame / until a complete sentence is constructed, /
The effect is a perpetual disquiet throughout the collection. Nothing is innocent and everything has the potential to turn against itself. Ivory's version of 'Creation' typically begins on the third day: On the third day, she draws the sun / into her mouth and swallows it whole. Towards the end of the poem: On the seventh day, she is barely breathing. / She hears the postman and the phone. This yoking together of the cosmic and the domestic runs the risk of bathos, but Ivory manages to maintain tension with a remarkable consistency of tone: And the clock clicks its tongue / the way only clocks can.
Despite occasional flights of whimsy, Ivory has established an eerily engaging style. Her poems are like mobiles suspended on invisible threads, charming to watch as they seem to spin by themselves in the air, but capable of administering more than a paper cut on the sensibility of the reader. Ivory's current interest in the Serbian poet, Vaško Popa, whose poetry often made use of the patter and pattern of children's games, suggests that Ivory may well embark on sequences or cycles, as opposed to single examples, of her delicately wrought, but tough-as-steel constructions.
The subjects of Elaine Randell's poems in Faulty Mothering, aren't likely to put up exquisite mobiles in their kitchens or sit around chatting about the attributes of their lovers. Instead of Follon's bowls of spicy metaphor slurped up in the middle of a carnival, we have plain fare served in reduced circumstances, but no less nourishing. The title sequence seems to echo the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff's Testimony where court transcripts from 1885 to 1890 were the source for a poetry unsparing in its delineation of the conditions of life on the social and economic margins of American society. Randell's poems in this sequence are based on her work with families, 'focusing on mothers who are experiencing problems in attachment to their children.' They combine parataxis, a telegraphic narrative, and strategic quotation from seemingly dispassionate, possibly official sources. None of these registers is privileged at the expense of another within the body of an individual poem, and the effect is of a compelling, three-dimensional, multiple consciousness. For example, the first poem begins Slip shod / worn through all my empty threats / smarty packet gold stars /, continues with fragments of dialogue inside a family, and finishes with a mother coping with her three children all at the same time. Her stress is conveyed with a consummate economy of means: Rachel ran in. / Is lunch ready, I'm starving. / She picked him up onto the edge of the wooden draining / board and soaked his foot in the sink, / she ran to the baby. Rachel shut up, she said and / ran past her.
Some poems in the sequence are less complex. VI narrates an episode of gross insensitivity by husband and sons, and IX describes the moment a husband leaves his wife. The heartbreak for the reader is deferred until You woke up and / asked for him. / daddy will / tuck you up I said. I couldn't think / what else to say. 'X' tells the story of a woman with twenty-five years of depressive anxiety following the death of her father. Chaplin could not have balanced pathos against comedy to better effect with the absurd list of her worries. Occasionally the horror of disintegrating lives is all too palpable: There is a breaking down / inside of her. There is a taste of / rat. It is shorn up / for good / like a dead person.
The latter part of the collection consists of short sequences, Songs for the Faithless, Songs for the Careless, Songs for the Harmless and Long Hair for Birds, this last suggesting an unlikely affinity with Helen Ivory, where a startled ram in escaping races faster under a barbed fence leaving / his long hair for birds.
The surface simplicity of Randell's work - metaphor is hardly evident - is supported by a remarkable handling of syntax and line break. In Songs for the Harmless, for example, syntax and alliteration combine with powerful effect: the blade dissolved slid easily no effort / slid o so soft into him without sound not like before / not like he remembered it. Syntax is the bedrock of poetic craft, and in Randell's poems her syntax operates at a level where feeling and memory combine to transform consciousness.
Not only consciousness but language is transformed in Michael Haslam's A Cure for Woodness. 'Still impossible to change to a hero of Art' wrote the poet and solicitor Roy Fuller in middle age, a poet as far away as possible from Haslam in his professional life. Haslam has never been anything other than a hero of art. Despite being educated at Cambridge University. Haslam earned a subsistence as a labourer until a legacy finally relieved him of the burden of the daily grind. A Cure for Woodness is the final part of a Haslam's 'Music' trilogy, published by the equally heroic Arc Publications. In an engaging introductory essay, Haslam explains how 'in the poetic record between Chaucer and Shakespeare' wood and woodness once 'shared the same scope of meanings as mad' and that mad itself is under attack and if 'mad were to be killed, maybe we'd see fresh shoots from the trunk of wood. We need a common word for all sorts of mental nonsense.'
A Cure for Woodness is not so much a cure as a tonic, a shot of vitamin B12 into our awareness of language. Drawing on a tradition which runs from Chaucer to Shakespeare, which encompasses Spenser and drafts in Hopkins from three centuries later, Haslam reawakens us to the knowledge that poetic language is nothing if it does not transform a reader's consciousness. The sequences in the book, Woodnesse, Abscence, Despondency & Oddness, Regressions, Cures for Woodness, and an Appendix are verbal music where much of the current decorum in poetic craft is transgressed. Random and internal rhyme, cheek-by-jowl internal assonance and alliteration, dreadful puns abound, and yet to read the poems is an exhilarating experience. Quite simply a poet is transforming the language, bringing to the surface connections long hidden, and creating verbal opportunities ignored by conventional poetic practice: I have bunches of lyrics. Rolling sheafs in clover. / By lad law lay by me. A ballad of / a bad bye-law. A tale of love / adulterated in the hollows.
In 'Lyric in Blemish' Haslam confronts the notion of poetic decorum itself in an imitation of Hopkins. The poem also quotes Robert Bridges' infamous comment on Hopkins's 'blemishes in the poet's style': Blemish is the native tongue / I speak in song. In the opening lines of 'Belabouring in Reverie' I am reminded of Mandelstam's essay on Dante, where Dante's walking pace is cited as the underlying rhythm of the Divine Comedy. Haslam writes Reface the lintel with a lump and scotch / and wire brush. Align and realign a line / by reck of eye and rule of thumb. Pull faces / thinking phrases for the lyric graces, lilac cordial / vanilla curlew and so on. Haslam's art is kinaesthetic. A poem is not only heard and seen, but its rhythms are physically worked out before it is set down.
Some of the longer pieces such as 'Old Hall Down In The Hollow; Spring Up Sunny Bank' have a symphonic structure, and even a Tennysonian musicality, which is constantly subverted, as in a movement from a late work by Shostakovich. The music emerges from a tuning of my own invention as Haslam writes in 'Prince Phoebus Columbus'. The book is so rich in individual poems and sequences, but perhaps 'The Love of English' sounds most deeply in this reader: Some days it is I want to cry, why who am I? / Such depth of pathos surely cannot all be mine. / It could be you down drinking by the stream / white wine in rain. It could be anyone...
These six collections show the continuing fruitful tension between the impulse to make it new, and the felt chains of convention, which cannot forego the illuminating potential of etymology, established forms, and the accumulation of successive perceptions of poetry as a formal but living art.
*
The Pamphleteers March On
reviewed by Peter Daniels
Graham Fulton, Twenty-Three Umbrellas, Controlled
Explosion Press, 28pp, £5; Words on
Canvas: Twenty new writers look at works in the National Galleries of Scotland,
National Galleries of Scotland, 32pp; Clare Best,
Treasure Ground, Happenstance, 36pp, £4; Paula Jennings, From
the Body of the Green Girl, Happenstance, 32pp, £4; Jon Stone, Scarecrows, Happenstance, 32pp, £4; John McCullough, The Lives of Ghosts, Tall Lighthouse, 17pp,
£4; Jude Rosen, A Small Gateway, Hearing Eye, 40pp, £4; Carole Bromley, Skylight, Smith/Doorstop, 29pp, £4; Sally Goldsmith, Singer, Smith/Doorstop, 27pp, £4; Anna Woodford, Party Piece, Smith/Doorstop, 28pp, £4
The poetry pamphlet boom
continues, with every month a blog or an article saying that they're the latest
thing. Look at this site: http://www.iotamagazine.co.uk/Issue.html. Or another competition pops up. Seren's 'Purple Moose' is now in its second
year. Pamphlets, or chapbooks as the Americans call them with a delicious touch
of archaism, do help to mop up the vast amount of poetry out there that can't
fit into the apparently ever-dwindling opportunities for book publication.
Oddly, they may even be easier to sell than poetry books, which aren't getting
into shops much anyway. A slim pamphlet that won't take up too much house room
may be more attractive than a book when offered person-to-person at readings or
in other merchandising opportunities.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but pamphlets
are still a print thing: there doesn't seem to be quite enough there in the internet approach. The 'e-chapbook',
as it is being offered by www.silkwormsink.com,
for example, feels too instant, too intangible for my taste. Maybe the e-book
pamphlet will work once we're all born with electronic devices in our hands,
but I believe that's the basic idea: it's something you're holding as you
peruse it.
In our hands, the printed
pamphlet can luxuriate in creamy paper - see the Rack Press productions
reviewed in the last Bow-Wow Shop -
and coloured fly leaves, like Happenstance; a smaller pocket size and
tried-and-tested but not in-your-face design like Smith/Doorstop; the rather
more design-fascist, less flexible house style of Tall Lighthouse (all red and
black, one stamp-size cover image, heavy typeface); and some simple but good
design from people like Hearing Eye. And the poems? They usually have a bit of
a theme weaving through them, as the form of publication seems to encourage
that. But some publishers like Peter Sansom of Smith/Doorstop reckons you don't
even need them in a particular order for a competition-winning pamphlet: 'Don't
worry about sequencing or subject matter. Just write good poems'. That's from
an interview in Sphinx no.11, the
pamphlet-focused magazine published by Happenstance, now alas being dropped
while Helena Nelson of Happenstance concentrates on other aspects of the
organisation. It is also well worth your while reading Peter Sansom's words in
our survey of editorial voices elsewhere in this issue.
Happenstance is part of the
Scottish poetry-pamphlet niche - well, more of an alcove or a roomy walk-in
cupboard, and getting towards a cavern. Not that all the Scottish publishers
aim only to publish Scots poets for a Scottish niche market: Happenstance
certainly don't. I picked up copies of Sphinx
along with one of their pamphlets at the Scottish Pamphlet Fair hosted by the
National Library of Scotland in December. I also picked up a few other things,
including Twenty Three Umbrellas by
Graham Fulton, published by his own Controlled Explosion Press. A high-end
pamphlet production almost approaching the artist's book (a genre I've never
quite got the hang of); nevertheless, it is simple and unpretentious, with 23
photographs of abandoned umbrellas on pavements, or tangled in bushes and
fences, with a single poem given a caption-like couple of lines for each photo.
'The poem is handwritten. No two copies are the same' - though I'm assuming,
perhaps wrongly, that each copy will contain the same poem. The handwriting is
small, unostentatious, not cursive.
The poem is about identity as generally defined by a job:
dog groomer astronaut
that's
all
says the caption to a
particularly well-destroyed umbrella advertising Dunlop. But we are human and
we breathe, we
put one foot
in
front of the other
(folding model with border of
perky cats, collapsing like a tent);
my hand in someone
else's
smile don't smile
(almost neatly furled, in
undergrowth full of bottles and cans). The pamphlet gives the umbrellas a new
life of sorts, and the dry, engaging tone of the poem speaks along with them.
The poet's experience with this
kind of thing shows through: no biography is given (though see www.grahamfulton-poetry.com),
but various previous publications are listed back to 1987. It upholds my faith in the
combination of image and word, which needs such care for balance: I don't want
to be unfair to Words on Canvas,
subtitled 'Twenty new writers look at works in the National Galleries of
Scotland' because they are new writers worth reading, but they have to stand
against reproductions of Titian and Rembrandt - as well as Damien Hirst, which
might be less of a struggle, though inevitably the pickled sheep says all it
needs to by itself. Fulton's umbrellas almost do that, but the understated poem
gives a whisper of something else that the reader can share, and none of it has
to be about an umbrella.
Happenstance has style and a
sense of purpose: publisher Helena Nelson runs a commentary about her dilemmas,
choices and plans in episodes of The
Happenstance Story sent to subscribers,
currently up to chapter four, alongside the broader perspective on pamphlets
in Sphinx. Her pamphlets now include
a 'sequence' series in which the poems are more than Peter Sansom's 'just good
poems'. One of these is Treasure Ground by
Clare Best, a sequence about an organic farm in the Lincolnshire fens. This is
book-ended with two prose pieces, first the arrival in the fens where
everything grows - 'I can almost believe the houses here began as sheds that
grew and grew, putting roots down, digging in' - and signing off with a
perspective on time, and the sea from which this land has been reclaimed, which
may be due to come back - 'Soon, perhaps'. In between, the poems are quiet but
insistent, repaying re-reading, especially the simpler poems in the middle. In
others, the metaphors sometimes draw attention - 'a dark red sea / of unshed
tears' ('Red Onions'). The play with litanies of place names, not in itself
new, works its magic because they are these
names:
Hawthorns, Wigtoft, Struggs Hill, Mandyke,
Seas End, Holbeach, Algarkirk.
The poem 'Airman' opens with a
54-word prose description of the pilot's death in 1954, with the 61 words of
the poem itself entirely about the landscape and the birds and animals. The
balance here is rather like the job of balancing picture and poem, but it works
beautifully.
In From the Body of the Green Girl Paula Jennings is not afraid to
attempt a poem based on a painting by Salvador Dali. It's called 'Seabird, What
has Death left in Your Belly'. I find this one of her few failures, needing the
picture too much. Perhaps she envies its word-free expression. The opening poem,
'Elegy for Ben', uses language well to describe nature - 'iron whiff of the
flat pool where trout graze' - but there is a yearning to inhabit it without
language, for there to be 'wordless news of the true forest'. The poems keep a
close relationship to various instances of the inarticulate, the ineffable, the
mythic. In 'At the Day Centre' communication is almost impossible:
every
day I speak jewellery and fireworks
every
day you ask, What is she saying?
Even through the patience of the
careworker the reader is allowed to sense a little exasperation - 'I say this
many times until he's safe enough'. In 'Looking for God' it seems the answer to
the search for meaning is to become a part of the pattern: 'I hunt / a spacious
metaphor', even while God 'the shadowless clown' is going to escape anyway. Animals are often the point of
connection with 'inarticulate' nature, more than once letting themselves be
ridden, but not in a literal way - in
'Night Road', after a car crash a woman is 'riding the road-kill, risen
/ steaming from the slippery ground', and she herself is dead from the
collision. In 'A Drinking Woman explains about the Tiger', the animal is
transformed into a kind of personal myth. Near the end of the pamphlet, several
poems about seasonal changes and changes of life employ the mythology of the
Bride and the Crone, in effective ways:
Patiently
she births herself
from
the body of the green girl,
and I admire how Paula Jennings
has been able to follow these themes through without becoming hackneyed.
Jon Stone is a quite different
poet, and though in Scarecrows there
is some rural life involving witchfinders and Black Shuck, or 'the rill and trill
of skylarks at Grimes Graves', the general mood is urban. In '1910' we are
climbing in and out of a canvas by Egon Schiele, in a poem which is less about
the pictures than exploring the processes of art, which could include poems, 'the
mirrors that will hang like dinner gongs, / ringing with the proofs of inner
torment'. The poems are somewhat psycho-geographical, with witchcraft and
superstition the most regularly occurring theme, like the sorcery underlying the
spell-like 'Jake Root', about ginger -
Mix
it with nutmeg and ground John the Conqueror
so
that I might have the upper hand
- and the fantastical advice
column of 'Spell For Those Whose Hair Causes Them Anxiety'. Stone's wit ranges
from daft punning - '(The Dark Lord Must Be) Aubade' - to self-conscious
understatement - 'The Guinness Book of
Record's / third most woe-begotten pub in Britain' - from slightly
overworked conceit, as in 'Bullshit-Related Injuries in the A & E', via
some neat rhyme and half-rhyme (bloodstain / headstone / Whitsun /
Solzhenitsyn), to other kinds of wordplay and music that is often simply lovely
to the ear, though once or twice the rhythm loses itself in awkward stresses.
The poem I like best is the most oblique, 'Kuebiko', where the pattern unfolds
a mysterious sequence of experiences:
the
red kites over the fringes of motorway,
the
red kites over the soft skulls of foxgloves,
the
teaspoons over the soft skulls of breakfast eggs
the
yolky mouths over the remains of breakfast eggs.
Perhaps the list device and its
cadence derive from Simon Armitage, but it's a Jon Stone poem all the same.
John McCullough's The Lives of Ghosts (Tall Lighthouse) is,
despite its title, not so concerned with supernatural characters. The 'ghosts'
emerge from the subjective experiences and fantasies of characters in the
poems, but their supernatural presence is deftly assembled from the details of
McCullough's economical storytelling. His taxi driver in 'The Long Mile' has a
'clone city inside my huge skull … its history written in scratches on
railings'. This is psycho-geography without the kind of factitious mystery that
has made it such an empty cliché in the hands of people like Peter Ackroyd. The
driver's scary stories are a human embodiment of it. 'We carry the ghosts of
all travellers with us' is a simple inner truth that we can all share. It also
operates with McCullough's other characters - like the transvestites, trans-sexuals
and barmen who operate as spirit guides or tell the reader about their lives.
In 'The Barman's Fantasy', he's sceptical of the tranny's conjuring of long-ago
leathermen embracing, but finds 'the two of them achingly real'. I'm not sure
that 'Georgie, Belladonna, Sid' conjures up the gay world of the forties and
fifties quite so well - the Polari
slang reads rather like a phrasebook exercise - but the characters come alive
in their period soap-opera. There's a gay not-so-sub sub-text to 'The Amazing
Tintin', who is not-so-young and without Haddock, sitting in a bar 'growing /
stubble and his wet hair won't lift // for the next frame': the trope of
superannuated fiction hero has been done before, but it's done well here.
Alongside all this bar-life,
which seems to echo Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night', McCullough invokes the
moon in several poems in various ways, sometimes mythical, sometimes by mood, and
at other times through science. 'Racing
the Light' follows up Isaac Asimov's observation about a cyclist moving as fast
as the moon's rotation. Altogether, he's a poet building up territory worth
exploring.
Jude Rosen's territory in A Small Gateway (Hearing Eye) covers
various Jewish worlds: that of the old East Enders; the Yiddish Europe they
came from; the extermination camps that took their relatives; Spinoza and his
understanding of God as a way of dealing with pain; the poet's experience of
Israel and the Palestine it displaces. In between, Sarajevo appears as a
parallel case of destruction and survival. Rosen's ear for language and eye for
detail bring the reader into these places, to meet these experiences head on.
In this way she answers her own wish in the opening poem
I yearned
to
embed my tiny feet in earth, grow
branches
and roots, turn into
a
menorah, kindling stories
out
of every twig, making them flare.
The poems about Palestine in
particular, which come at the end of the book's series of Jewish experiences,
negotiate an identification with oppressed people-
She
narrates in English
but
reverts to Arabic when
I ask
her: Who did this?
Jehud she says.
I ask
Aziz, Does she know we're Jews?
Tell her - he says - Explain.
The poems are not presented
explicitly as a sequence, but the ordering of them is crucial to this pamphlet.
Good poems make good pamphlets, as Peter Sansom says, but something else that
makes the poems work together can make them outstanding.
The pamphlet winners of the
2008/09 Sansom-operated Poetry Business Competition were Carole Bromley's Skylight, Sally Goldsmith's Singer, Anna Woodford's Party Piece, all under the Smith/Doorstop
imprint. As I've suggested, I like the Smith/Doorstop format (and that's not
only because I've been published by them in the past), although the smaller
size does mean that longer lines can get squeezed inelegantly into the margin.
I'd like to put in a plea for the old traditional turnover, for a run-on line
not to be always avoided. It's practical, even if it inevitably has to be a
compromise; and it's become so under-used that many readers simply don't
understand it, and wonder why they are looking at such a peculiar layout. Poets
who write longer lines, and their attentive readers, must get used to the need
for it. Rant over.
Carole Bromley's Skylight has a confident tone, but I
began to want something different from the epiphanies and juxtapositions, like
the synchronicity of 'Organic Veg', with Chris Evans playing 'Wooden Heart' on
the radio while she prepares kohl rabi. The what's-on-the-radio poem needs at
least as much work as the picture poem, and I felt this one was coasting along,
as are the picture poems 'A Jewish Giant…' (after Diane Arbus) and 'The Lovers'
(after Magritte). Meanwhile, 'Penelope with the Suitors' (after Bernadino
Pintoricchio) is a good poem about Penelope the well-known character from
Homer, and doesn't need the picture to be mentioned at all. Other poems involve
much mentioning of brand names or the Dave Clark Five or other people's books.
One poem that gets away with evoking a literary giant quite niftily is
'Suddenly, as the Result of an Accident', which is about someone picking
flowers fifty years ago near Briggflatts. Perhaps (to be really curmudgeonly) I
like this poem because it's more oblique, but it's still namedropping Bunting's
masterpiece. The best two in the pamphlet face each other, 'Church' and 'A
Candle for Lesley', and they are simple and effective in their oblique
narratives.
Sally Goldsmith's Singer makes me feel curmudgeonly for
not liking it more than I do, but some of the detail needs more attention, and
some devices feel too mechanical, although there's plenty of the right stuff.
The opening poem, 'Cerebos', combines domestic memory and the numinous 'at the
edge of what is there', which is a characteristic of other poems too,
especially those involving woods, trees and birds. These contrast with poems
which tend to concentrate upon the domestic angle - 'Bird', for example, which
includes a teenage aunt and her budgie. The story's end is both sudden and
effective. There's an attention to the sound of word-combinations, but this
comes and goes, and sometimes comes too much all at once, as in
Only
rattled blackbirds breach
the
arched green hush
where
banks are mossed.
Technique like this can be bold,
but when it becomes too self-conscious, it is less effective. In the sestina
'Song' the six endings include the extravagant run of 'the child, the aunt, the
grandfather', which is repeated in full each time. This takes the poem too far
in the direction of a soporific chant effect, until it is redeemed by
separating the three elements into each line of the final trio. This is not a sestina
that makes its effects out of double meanings for the end-words.
Double meaning does appear in 'The Singer', but the poem is much more about the sewing machine than the 'old songs' and 'singing line', which come in as a perfunctory nod in the direction of the more usual meaning of the title. I'm sorry to say (because it's a heartfelt poem on a painful subject) that 'Villanelle for Jo' is too ordinary to get away with the rhythmic liberties that might have worked, but didn't - including one over-length line which is almost guillotined off the page. If Smith/Doorstop are confident about poems like this despite curmudgeons like me, and they are keen that lines should never be turned over, then they'll have to use a bigger format. They have done that occasionally. Sally Goldsmith's real strength is in poems that build organically out of images, like the woodland symbolism in the erotic 'Beyond the Pale'.
Anna Woodford in Party Piece also has some good short
poems about sex - 'You fiddle with the catch / between my legs' ('Birdhouse'),
or the more oblique 'Big Bed Scene' in which
your body
has
turned to cliché
in my
hands
and yet in memory this
relationship has also become the great sex that it probably wasn't. There are
other poems that play with time and space effectively, like 'Journey 14/34':
leaving
other girls to get ahead
of
her in History, she ran
into
the real world
- and the poet wants to reassure
her that 'she's on her way somewhere'. The time travel here is more artificial
than the image-led device used in 'Taking in the Washing' where 'our line's
unbrokenness' starts with 'your
boxers, my bra' but goes right back to where 'Gran is dollypegging Dad's
nappies'. In 'Engaged', people are ringing
from a
different time zone, from Scarborough
in the
sixties, where Mum licked Dad's face in a photo
booth.
I find Anna Woodford the most
accomplished of the three Smith/Doorstoppers, and her poems about families,
religion and school are unpretentious and effective. The final poem, 'The Tree',
which is about balancing in the yoga class - 'As a tree, I make a / good woman
standing / on one leg' - itself balances the opening poem about her mother, who
almost overbalances in her daughter' killer heels. Who says that the deft
arrangement of poems doesn't matter?
*
New poetry In full flight
White Egrets, Derek Walcott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 96
pages; $24. Faber; £12.99
Modern poetry seems all
too often to be associated with coy, small-minded ironists; teasing, finicky
word players who often write in disappointingly short lines and seem to lack
the ambition, the emotional force, the rhetorical reach, and even the range of
subject matter of great poets of the past. Where to go these days to find the
real thing?
Derek Walcott, born on
the Caribbean island of St Lucia in 1930, and winner of the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1992, is one answer. Mr Walcott's poetry has often possessed a
clarity, an emotional forcefulness and a descriptive exuberance which has set
him apart from most of the rest. For all that, his last book, the all-too-brief Selected
Poems of 2007, was something of a disappointment, displaying little of his
range and his greatness as a poet. Omeros,
his 1990 novel-length masterpiece, for example, was represented by an extract
no more than a tenth of the original.
His new book, White Egrets, by comparison, is a
magnificent, late achievement. As in Omeros,
where local fishermen assumed the identities of heroes from Homer, Mr Walcott
raises up the local-the sights and the sounds of his native St Lucia-until they
become the stuff of epic. This is a book that luxuriates in description and the
use of extended metaphor-as Homer did himself. The book explores the idea of
self-renewal. It is an elegiac work-Mr Walcott was 80 in January-whose stance
recalls two other great poets who raged against the dying of the light, Dylan
Thomas and W. B. Yeats.
As with Yeats, the very
possibility of death's approach gives a new urgency and a new energy to the
poet's apprehending eye. Everything to be seen and heard becomes precious and
surprising. The spirit of nature feels unquenchable, unkillable. Walcott achieves
the same here. Those white egrets, ever ministering presences, turn and return
throughout the book, representing the brilliance and the beauty of everything
that is. They are also "those bleached regrets of an old man's memoirs".
Although the book begins
in St Lucia, it goes on to range widely around 'old' Europe-Capri, Sicily,
Spain. The Europe of which he
writes is both real, and some fabled notion of the real, set apart from us, as
much its past as its present, a place of the imagination as much as of the
mind. Mr Walcott writes of places seen with an imagistic crispness, a
snapshot-spareness. But he also feels, in part, to be embodying the ghosts of
some of the great European poets who have influenced his life and writing,
especially Dante and Petrarch. The writing has a mellifluous, rhapsodic quality
throughout, hymning the beauty of the earth even as it recognises both the
precious fragility of all that it sees, and the fragility of the recording eye
itself.
*
Horrors Sealed in Concrete
Concrete poetry, which flourished mightily in the
1960s, and still sputters along even to this day, involves a kind of intricate
dance between the verbal and the visual. Letters of words, arranged in a
certain way, become the visual enactments of their own meanings. Dance is
exactly the word. Concrete poetry most often demonstrates a kind of
delightfully perky humour.
A remarkable, newly translated book is published
this month which sees concrete poetry put to an entirely different and wholly
uncharacteristic use. Heimrad Backer (1925-2003) was an Austrian poet,
photographer and avant garde magazine editor. He joined the Hitler Youth as a
teenager, and then the Nazi party. Decades after the end of the war, he began
to try to make some sense of the horrors of the Holocaust by building texts out
of fragments of authentic documents from those dark years. He used the
testimonies of prisoners and guards, medical charts and train schedules. This
book, which is called Transcript
(Dalkey Archive Press, £12.99), organizes, page by page, all this material as
concrete poems - in lines, cross shapes, terrible, serried ranks. Everything
becomes horribly stuttering and fragmentary, nightmarishly wooden and
inevitable. The shapes of the poems enact the horror of their message.
Utterly different in tone is In the Wake of the Day (Carcanet, £9.95), the new collection of
poetry by Manchester-born, US-domiciled poet John Ash. Ash's particular kind of
casual insouciance of manner owes much to the American poets whose influence he
has absorbed. He writes with a lovely, seemingly easy, loose-limbed elegance.
He appears to be in conversation with himself, somewhat bemusedly, somewhat
idlingly, as if life is difficult to fathom, as if all one can hope for is a
kind of approximation of the truth. It is very seductively and inveiglingly
readable. Part of the book gives us versions of poems after the Alexandrian poet
Constantine Cavafy. Spiritually, these two poets are kindred spirits. Both
clever, they never wear their learning on their sleeves.
Brian Henry's new book consists of a long double
poem called Quarantine:Contagion
(Arc, £8.99). It is set at some mysterious, ill-defined moment in time -
perhaps during the Middle Ages. The poem is a compulsively readable dramatic
monologue which swims in and out of comprehensibility. Told in the first person,
by a man who is lying beside a river, who may or may not be dead, its numbing,
relentless manner of delivery rather puts you in mind of Beckett. Lines seem to
overlap and echo each other. Yet it is not modishly grim. In fact, the entire
sequence, as it builds and builds, is extraordinarily gripping - in spite of the fact that we
proceed through it as if we were feeling our way through a chilling fog,
unaware of the final destination of the route we are taking, unsure even of the
ground beneath our feet.
The ekphrasis
is a time-honoured form. It means a poem which has responded to a painting. The
Catalan writer Ernest Farres has written an entire book of ekphrases which
loosely pick up on the themes and the moods of many paintings by the great, 20th-century
American artist Edward Hopper (Carcanet,
£12.95). Hopper is, of course, a gift to any poet. His paintings are full of
enigmatic stories dreaming of their elaboration by poets such as Farres. And
Farres has done a wonderful job of reading the moods, the manners, the
pictorial quirkinesses of Hopper for us in these poems which are spoken in an
easy, quasi-American vernacular.
Any reader will warm immediately to the lovely,
engagingly intimate and conversational manner of Molly Peacock in The Second Blush (Norton, £9.99). These
poems don't talk down to us from a high level of intellectual obtuseness. They
don't make us feel guilty about our own ignorance of myth. Their companionable
themes - ghost cats (this is one of the very best), artichoke hearts, a picnic
- seem to engage with our day-to-day lives. They seem to offer the everyday
back to us, burnished, if not a little sanctified.