Neck of the Woods by Peter Makin (Isobar Press)

Grief resides in the particular and few poets know that better than Peter Makin. Perhaps this understanding of how emotions are located within a sense of ‘thereness’ is part of what makes his critical writing about Pound so clear: ‘Allied with subtlety were solitude, and that old Platonic doctrine of an immaterial soul caught in the net of an “accidental” body.’
Pound’s Cantos (John Hopkins, 1985) is the best introduction to the poems’ enormous voyaging forth that I know. The lucid quality of Peter Makin’s writing is only rivalled by his own book on Basil Bunting published in 1992 by Clarendon Press, Oxford: The Shaping of his Verse:

Statements by Bunting:
1. It is “worth dwelling on things”;

2. “Suckling poets should be fed on Darwin till they are filled with the elegance of things seen or heard or touched.”

The particular. And LIGHT.

“Pound deeply believed that dead ends, sorrow, darkness could not be other than accidental in the significant scheme of things. The primal sin was to shut out the light; it followed that the light was essentially there.”
(Pound’s Cantos, ch. 1)

Neck of the Woods gathers all the poems from the period 2000-2015 that Peter Makin wishes to preserve. On the reverse side of this beautifully produced book from Paul Rossiter’s Isobar Press there is a note from August Kleinzahler:

“The singular force behind this collection of poems, with its six sections, is loss and grief, the expressions of which drift in and out of the poems, as if emerging then receding behind the clouds, usually in the form of glimpsed memory.”

Pound’s Cantos was dedicated ‘to Corrêa’ as was Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse. Makin’s edition of Bunting’s lectures, Basil Bunting on Poetry (John Hopkins, 1999) was dedicated ‘to or for, /by, with, or from / Correa’. This recent publication of Peter Makin’s poems concludes with a section titled ‘Ato’ and is headed ‘Stella Irene Correa obit 15.12.97. The mark, print, trace or track leads the reader to light:

“O so sweet, o so gentle
light,

and these banks;

suddenly adown the angle
a crow’s shadow, and more slowly
across the path;

and I look again, and see the stump
way up on the scoop of hill
from which I looked down on this path
where she walked, then in snow,

now in this light,
with the crow’s shadow.”

Loss and the remains of loss is to be “surrounded by clutter”:

“ ‘From Correa’s Room
To Be Sorted’
suitcases
clothes hanging along the verandah
blocking the view

and the litter of her intentions
and my intentions, now that I no longer
think it worth while to intend

not quite in sight of the sprays of white
orchids outside the back-room window;”

The sounds of the line yearn outwards from “quite” to “sight” to “white”; the precision of sound in “orchids” brings the vision closer to the room as we move towards the enclosing sound which is the only aperture through which the living may stare, the “window”.

These poems move in a Poundian way and the opening of the first section, ‘Life-Sketch’ sets the reader “forth on the godly sea” as “an infinity of water” is seen “rushing under the beach to the sea”. With echoes of ‘Briggflatts’

“dusk gathered
a grey silent
depth over everything.

Sweaty summer night,
light taking years to fade

parents
out”

And in this first section of the book we move from Lincolnshire to North Kyoto and to

“A small mountain hut
in which to fade
(with peculiar inscriptions
in charcoal).”

In his 2008 essay on ‘Huts’ J.H. Prynne reminds us of the world that lies behind a word as he brings to our attention the lines from William Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening’, composed in 1746:

“Or if chill blustring Winds, or driving Rain,
Prevent my willing Feet, be mine the Hut,
That from the Mountain’s Side,
Views Wilds, and swelling Floods,
And Hamlets brown, and dim-discover’d Spires,
And hears their simple Bell, and marks o’er all
Thy Dewy Fingers draw
The gradual dusky Veil.”

In Prynne’s words “the hut is a marginally safe haven which connects very closely to the threatened invasion of cold and wet from the wild outside, and this is the vantage that the poet must summon courage to occupy, the distance from a settled and socialised habituation.”

Fulke Greville’s poem ‘Absence and Presence’ plays around with ideas of how one might attempt to convince oneself that absence has its own qualities, only to conclude “Absence is Pain”.

This collection of poems by Peter Makin is essential reading and I urge you to get a copy without delay.

Ian Brinton 4th October 2015

http://isobarpress.com