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Monthly Archives: August 2018

Bloodlines by Andy Brown (Worple Press)

Posted on August 26, 2018 by tearsinthefence
Bloodlines by Andy Brown (Worple Press)

The title of these poems suggests two different things to my mind. The bloodlines that flow through our bodies are those veins and arteries that pump our sense of immediacy: they keep the ‘here’ and ‘now’ moving. The bloodlines that connect us to our past remind us of the more established patterns that might be traceable over centuries. One of the more extreme versions of the possible connections between past and present is a belief in cryonic preservation and Andy Brown’s quietly humane poem ‘Committal’ opens by contemplating this:

“Today a teenage girl secured her right
to have herself cryonically preserved

so maybe in five hundred years, or more,
once mutation’s mystery has been solved,

her body may be warmed to stir again
and she can live the life she’s barely led.”

There is a moving tone to this picture as we are confronted with youth’s clutch at a straw and it is given a greater emotional emphasis by being juxtaposed with a mature awareness of what one might be able to pass on to future generations if one did not have life taken away so young. The poet’s own wish for commitment to the ground involves being interred “deep in loamy woodland soil” and having a sapling oak planted above his head:

“so hair and skin and bone may be reborn

in twig and leaf, in xylem, riddled bark;
so the seep of muscle and marrow may

replenish soil, feed worm and ant and moth…”

There is perhaps enormous comfort in thinking that what we do feeds the life that goes on after our death although, as Hamlet recognized, the idea is threaded with ironies because after all “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm”. When Claudius asks the meaning of this he is told that it reveals “how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar”. In ‘Committal’ the word “feed” occurs three times and the important emphasis is on how the present feeds the future and, of course, how the past feeds the present. The last couplet of the poem has a fine echo to it and we are made aware of the tentative connections between ‘now’ and ‘then’:

“just let the faintest hints of musk remain:
that trace and pulse of what we must become.”

The trace and pulse, both aspects of a bloodline, present us with the hints of a past that bodies forth into a present as with Hardy’s ‘The Voice’ where he can almost see again his young girlfriend standing outside the town where they used to meet some forty years ago “where you would wait for me”. The memory is held in the air, like a scent, and he is almost seeing the way she was dressed “even to the original air-blue gown”. This is a history that offers those “faintest hints”, or what Hardy recalled about returning from a walk after Emma’s death, “that underlying sense / Of the look of a room on returning thence”. In Julian Barnes’s novel, Flaubert’s Parrot, the narrator wonders about how we can seize the past and recalls an anecdote from his college-days in which a piglet smeared with grease was let loose at the end of term dance:

“It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.”

There is of course that less immediately personal bloodline that connects us with a common past: our inheritance of central feelings such as greed and violence. Reading Brown’s two-part poem ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ one is drawn into that world of Chaucer’s bleak humour as the three thieves murder each other and the Pardoner watches the bodies disappear “like runoff down the drain”. However, a more pensive tone informs ‘Homo naledi’, the epigraph of which refers to a new species of hominid that was unearthed in South Africa in 2013 after having been given a ritual burial some two million years before:

“In Gauteng’s caves the dons are asking how
the branches of our past converge; if much
connects these buried bones with the longer
lines that lead out from the trees. They will
in time shed light.”

These are thoughtful, quiet poems and, as befits elegies, they linger in the mind.

Ian Brinton 26th August 2018

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Music, Selected Poems of Tarō Naka Translated by Andrew Houwen & Chikako Nihei (Isobar Press)

Posted on August 17, 2018 by tearsinthefence
Music, Selected Poems of Tarō Naka Translated by Andrew Houwen & Chikako Nihei (Isobar Press)

In his introduction to this long-overdue translation of one of Japan’s most significant post-war poets Andrew Houwen draws attention to the importance of Buddhism and transience. He suggests that Naka came to realise the importance of the impermanence of all things when he was “confronted with the war’s destruction” and points us towards the 1954 poem ‘Scene II’ with its italicised epigram ‘summer 1945’:

“scabs of black memory tear off
the guillotine river cuts up
the city’s torn skin

pushed along in the flow
countless burnt eyes
eyes
eyes”

An echo here points us of course to Eliot’s ‘The Fire Sermon’ with its focus upon both the river and the burning and to that poet’s use of Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations:

“All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire?
The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire.”

It was a year after the publication of The Waste Land that William Carlos Williams published Spring and All with its emphasis on the “universality of things” and this later fed that central phrase from the first book of Paterson:

“Say it! No ideas but in things”

The impermanence of things haunts the poetry that Naka wrote after he had returned to Hakata at the end of the war, after Hiroshima, to find that his home and his hometown had been devastated. This was a world where “in the distance burnt shrivelled trees / no longer / have any trace of life”. What remains are the “skeletons of apartments // where the smell of the rocky shore drifts / a cavern – / time’s insides / gone”.
Naka’s first mature collection of poems was composed between 1957 and 1964 before being published in 1965 as Ongaku (Music). Introducing the collection with a Note the poet writes

“Mu is not ‘nothing’. It is the mu of existing things, breathing mu, the mu of writhing waves. It is because music sounds in these things, or perhaps in order to make music sound, that people produce words.”

Words, like music, possess an independence from their creator and this in Naka’s words “allows the creation to exist on its own”. Poems, like music, exist in their own world and the last section of this immensely important new book from Isobar Press is given over to Naka’s 1966 prose ‘Notes for a Poetics’:

“The activity of writing is itself, of course, a visible activity. One holds a pen, faces the paper, and in everyday time moves one’s own hand. However, what one’s consciousness works to indicate certainly does not take place in the visible world, but in a separate, unreal one. In this unreal space, through using those unreal ‘things’, words, one acts in order to reach (an indefinable) something.
The activity of creating poetry is always an escape to this unreal space.”

The 1975 collection of poems, Hakata, possesses a haunting sense of unseen tracks:

“the autumn woman’s skin has a trembling lily’s scent
walking through withered leaves in the distance”

and the poet registers “time’s / footfall” and “the thirst for the far shore of the futureless blue sky”. As Houwen puts it in his highly valuable introduction

“A poem, as a product of the combination of words, depends on the words’ interaction with each other, which is something that, as Naka observes in ‘Notes for a Poetics’, ‘always surpasses the writer” (Naka’s emphasis) and, as words’ associations continually shift with new readings, the poem, like all entities, is in constant flux.

To return to William Carlos Williams and 1923:

“Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains…One thing laps over on the other.”

This first book-length collection of Tarō Naka’s work in English provides an essential addition to the book-shelves of all readers of serious poetry. Thanks again to Paul Rossiter’s fine Isobar Press (http://isobarpress.com).

Ian Brinton 17th August 2018

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Fair by Martin Thom (Infernal Methods)

Posted on August 6, 2018 by tearsinthefence
Fair by Martin Thom (Infernal Methods)

The poem that Shelley wrote on the occasion of the 1819 massacre in Manchester was titled ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and that very word conjures up a world of deceit as though politicians, like Prufrock, prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet. In Shelley’s poem the poet meets “Murder on the way –” and he had a “mask like Castlereagh”:

“Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds flowed him”

Sidmouth, Home Secretary at the time of the Peterloo Massacre, appears

“Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.”

In this recently published chapbook poem we meet Sir Michael Fallon, Liam Fox and Amber Rudd.
Martin Thom’s long-term interest in Shelley is evident when we look at the front page of the fourth issue of the magazine he edited, Turpin:

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of men over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world… (‘A Defence of Poetry’)

And that evidence is there now in this recent publication from the Press whose name is taken from the poetry of William Blake. In this whirling explosion of outrage where the “Strict licensing of ordinance” is swiftly followed by the “margin of collateral” and “Harm to school or hospital” is delivered “In a hell-sent British shell” Thom’s eloquence of anger is revitalising.

“Eldon, Sidmouth, Castlereagh
Are in the stocks that Shelley made
And in the cuts that Cruikshank drew
Rotten fruit that outrage threw
Turn to emblems on the page.”

In the political world of Martin Thom’s poem the “devil dust” of modern warfare brings “mayhem to the mortal screen” and “infant hope, pale despair / In a second are not there”. The poem itself was drafted in the late summer of 2017 as preparations for the DSEI Arms Fair were under way at ExCel London, in London Docklands. Perhaps the nearest we have had recently to this bitter outburst of indignation about war was Tony Harrison’s A Cold Coming, Gulf War Poems published by Bloodaxe in 1991 and then, of course J.H. Prynne’s 2004 Refuse Collection where in the “curving / mirror of enlarged depravity daily and abhorrent a / comfort of disgust adjusted to market slippage”.

Ian Brinton, 6th August 2018

Infernal Methods: 1a Lupton Street, London NW5 2JA

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