Monthly Archives: July 2024

Your Nearness by Forrest Gander (Arc Publications)

Posted on July 28, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Your Nearness by Forrest Gander (Arc Publications)

This unique collection deserves, and requires, many readings so that its profundity and beauty may be fully absorbed and appreciated.

The ideology of Sangam literature underpins the whole of Your Nearness. Sangam – which translates as ‘gathering’, ‘meeting’, ‘fraternity’- strives to transcend boundaries of time and space and involves a gathering of individuals united in spirit, sharing a common vision and seeking meaning and purpose in a state of togetherness. If there are differences, they only enhance the spirit of Sangam.

An essential aspect of Sangam poetics is its focus on an inner realm. ‘Nature’ corresponds with the inner landscape of an individual and extends beyond itself to become a metaphor of the mind. Two sections of Your Nearness are called ‘Sangam Acoustics’. The scholar, N. Manu Chakravarthy, describes them as ‘the blossoming of the Sangam consciousness’ which resonates in India and in the Californian landscape through motifs of  ‘Sea, Mountain, Pastoral, Forest and Wasteland’ which reveal ‘the confluence of the interior and exterior’. 

There are environmental concerns in Your Nearness. ‘Wasteland’ depicts a futuristic scene of grimness. Man,  says Gander, has lost his ‘cadence’ and will regret his ‘petty-righteous cruelties’ revealed, for example,  when the neem tree is ‘without blossoms’. What will it be like, he asks

       If local animals make themselves nocturnal to avoid you, if swarms

                  of laughing thrushes no longer descend from the summit …

       … if this orange lichen – gossiping across borders – blackens,

                curls, and goes silent? (‘In the Mountains’)

It is lichen which provides the central and all-encompassing motif of Your Nearness – lichen which is the synergistic alliance of a fungus and algae or cyanobacteria, lichen which does not grow in polluted land, which is collaborative and transformative so that through asexual reproduction the original organisms, whose merging involves a mutual alteration, are changed utterly.

And it is through lichen, as Forrest Gander feels and describes it, that love and identity combine and embrace. In ‘Twice Alive’  the landscape of nature and the landscape of intimacy are so entwined that the entranced reader also becomes part of the ongoing metamorphosis. (The passages in italics that show the journey are my own).

 In this scene there is a combination of moss, perfume, skin, memory and lichen:

       I crush oak moss between finger and thumb

       for its sweet perfume persistent on

       your skin when I touch your throat, so slow

       to evaporate, the memory of seeing

       sunburst lichen on the sandstone cliff’

presently

       evening finds us at this woods’ edge where

       at a dead oak’s base

       shoestring-rot glimmers, its luminescent

       rhizomes reflected from the eyes

       of a foraging racoon that doesn’t yet sense us

       air ghostly and damp clings

       as we step from our woods

       to look across the field towards the first

       lane of lit houses, their dull pewter

       auras restrained by wet haze

and here we have the total merging of fungi, rain, slime, the beloved’s brown eyes and a sense of mystery and unease

       cordyceps – the brown of your  eyes softened

       with rain and remotely fluorescent – dissolve

       into slime after a few days, whatever we thought

       we were following was following us, its

       intention linked to our own

Many of the most beautiful poems about intimacy in Forrest Gander’s Your Nearness are about this mingling of cells. Here is two verses from ‘Unto Ourselves: to See What’s There’. For me they sum up all the universality, the inner and outer landscapes, the fusing and merging, the transformations:

       Across the cytoplasm of adjacent cells

       goes a signal that turns you towards me, turns

       me into you. We are coupled in quiet

       tumult, convergent arguments, an alien

       rhythm becoming familiar …

       Because excess is what it took

       for us to transform, to effulge. You cast

       your life beyond itself. Can’t you sense me

       within your ecstatic openess

       like rain mingling with red earth?

       Without you I survived and with you

       I live again in radical augmentation

       of identity because we have

       effaced our outer limits, because

       we summoned each other. In you,

       I cast my life beyond itself.

A number of Forrest Gander’s own photographs enhance this finely presented collection. But no review can do justice to the depths of language and spirituality in Your Nearness. Such insights deserve time for participation and sharing. To use the poet’s own word, everything is ‘combinatory’.

Mandy Pannett 28th July 2024

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SPIRALS: a multilingual poetry and art book edited by Hari Marini & Barbara Bridger (Tears in the Fence)

Posted on July 10, 2024 by tearsinthefence
SPIRALS: a multilingual poetry and art book edited by Hari Marini & Barbara Bridger (Tears in the Fence)

This interactive book, edited by Hari Marini and Barbara Bridger, and artfully designed by Westrow Cooper, celebrates a ten year project created by the Part Suspended Artist Collective, and is available from

https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward/ 

SPIRALS, a collaborative multidiscipline, multilingual project involving artists with a shared feminist perspective, spanned a decade of activity from 2013-2023. Using the symbol of a spiral as an inspiration, a series of performance rituals, artistic interventions, performance writing, audio-visual manifestations, online projects, exhibitions, and theatrical events took place in the UK, Europe and beyond.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part explores time, topos, arrival and longing. The second part considers isolation, Covid and Women’s writing, spirals, circles, galaxies, turning points and breath. The third part features the SPIRALS open archive and selected contributions to that archive from 2022. Lockdown, with its enforced period of contemplation, and the associations of spirals as a geophysical feature serve to contextualise the juxtapositions of different languages and cultures within a common humanity. The work is profoundly ethnographic, feminist, and celebrates a togetherness and unity as opposed to division and conflict at a time when populist nationalism began to widen its appeal.

Involving poets, translators, and artists from throughout Europe, SPIRALS transcends the constraints of linear time and space, spiraling in and out of temporal boundaries. It initiates conversations that traverse waking and dreaming realms, navigating through cityscapes and landscapes, and forces the reader to think and feel more laterally. The interplay between interiority and exteriority creates a tapestry that invites contemplation and engagement through time and space. As Niya B writes in the poem, ‘an end and a beginning’:

every   seed    carries its own    memory

every   skin     carries its own    history

every   body   carries its own    weight

every   step    carries its own    intention

every   soil      carries its own    dead

The anthology includes a series of QR codes enabling the reader to access videos and other documents from a tapestry of collaborative events during a tumultuous decade. SPIRALS offers a ritualistic probing of origins, naming and time through the cycles of birth, life and death, ethnographic and archival materials, appendices, editorial notes, preface, and colour artwork. It is a joy to read.

Amongst the contributors are Niya B, Suparna Banerjee, Barbara Bridger, Sarahleigh Castelyn, Sally Pomme Clayton, Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo, Georgia Kalogeropoulou, John London, Erini Margariti, Hari Marini, Simon Persighetti, Nisha Ramayya and Beatriz Viol.

David Caddy 10th July 2024

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A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Cape Poetry)

Posted on July 4, 2024 by tearsinthefence
A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Cape Poetry)

Michael Ondaatje’s poetry is rooted in memories and an attempt to make connections between them. It is a quiet, persuasive poetry with a sense of otherworldliness to it. Sometimes this is due to a fuzziness of recall, a sense of distance and time; sometimes due to geography and place (poems about going to school in Colombo, Sri Lanka); at other times a deliberate engagement with the unknown or other, be that ‘the plotless thirteen hundred / pages of a Sanskrit dictionary’ he reads in ‘Definition’ or the totally unknowable combination of veterinary treatment and animal sounds:

     THE CABBAGETOWN PET CLINIC

     For years I wrote during the day

     above a veterinarian

     The howls, the heavy breathing, the sighs

     from that faraway untranslated world

Of course, whilst neither Ondaatje or the reader can know the language of animals, what Ondaatje can do is recreate the experience of writing in solitude and hearing what is going on below. I like the fact there is no description of his room, where the clinic is, or what he is writing, just the establishment of occupation and the metaphor of what is being written as another world which he is struggling to access. Simple but complex. Four lines. Done and dusted.

Of course, very few of the poems in this book are this compact. Many tell stories, or ponder, philosophically, on the emotions or scenes being recalled. ‘Lost’ moves from the narrator ‘remember[ing] the afternoon I kept losing you / at the Evolution exhibit in Cambridge’ to a suggestion that ‘one of us became the forsaken lover / who somebody might wave from a subtitled dream’ to a more dramatic final questioning last verse:

     How did we let slip each other’s hand

     in the carboniferous era on the third floor

     before we wandered down the Triassic times.

Here are not only a couple losing each other, physically and emotionally, but also an evocation of a huge sense of time and distance, separation; perhaps of humans adrift in the vast universe.

Love and longing are frequently the subject, or one of the subjects, of poems here. ‘Leg Glance’ considers ‘The dangers of the subjunctive mood / when love affair are still all coal and smoke’, using cricket as a sustained metaphor for desire, noting that ‘not bothering to move / from the path of the dangerous ball’ is ‘how you make a song / out of someone else’s rumour’. Or perhaps it is a poem about cricket using love as a metaphor?

It is this uncertainty that I enjoy, the fact that these poems, in many ways traditional free verse narratives, can not be simply pinned down and defined. Ondaatje’s poems are slippery and complex. The six part poem ‘A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa’ could be considered a travelogue (‘Crossing the mile-wide ten-mile depth / of the San Andreas fault and three time zones’), a history lesson (‘Ottoman rule prohibited the building of churches / higher than a horse and rider’), or a metaphysical or religious poem. In part 4, ‘How to Paint an Icon’, we are instructed to

     Depict new rain whenever it arrives over the hills.

     No sunlight. Everything is sunlight.

This is physics, colour as reflected light, but also tied up with the notion that icons are a window to God, not a representation of the saint depicted. Part 5 expounds upon ‘the silence in icons’ and also notes the ‘deafness in icons’ and the fact that ‘Icons do not travel.’

By now the poem sequence has become a prose poem. Part 6, the longest, returns to the theme of ‘How to paint an icon’ but also considers the lives represented by icons; notions of pilgrimage, confession and veneration; offers us a part of a travel diary which includes the radio of the poem’s title; and recalls being shown ‘a photograph of three poets standing together, each half blind, so they had only the perspective and depth-of-field of three eyes among them’. They are not named or described, but it is clear as the 11 page sequence ends that it is another allusion to how we see, represent and (mis)remember what we desire or once knew. ‘”I recall what you were wearing, even now”‘, says the narrator in closing, ‘”when I did not even know of you, had not yet even desired you, and was awake all night.”‘

Whether in the realms of dreams and the imagination or the realities of ‘What can be Named in the Earth’, Ondaatje is adept at swimming in the rivers of memory he creates, enticing us into the complex currents of time. A Year of Last Things is an engaging and personal book, offering an ‘intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know.’ The author is exploring too, suggesting that he ‘will not even remember writing it.’

Rupert Loydell 4th July 2024

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One Step at a Time by Alice Kavounas (Shearsman Books)

Posted on July 2, 2024 by tearsinthefence
One Step at a Time by Alice Kavounas (Shearsman Books)

A desire to see more clearly colours the poems in Alice Kavounas’ collection One Step at a Time as they migrate, via the Prague Spring and the Coachella Valley, from 19th Century Turkey to ‘the ancient ophiolitic ground’ of present-day Cornwall. Kavounas is driven by an ‘obsession for observation’ and displays a very fine attention to detail. But birds remind her repeatedly of her shortsightedness, and she marvels at their more far-reaching vision. She says of the owl in particular:

            Even Athena needed an owl

            to help her see the truth.

            Why not me, here on earth?

Athena’s presence in these lines is no accident; given Kavounas’ Greek heritage, her mention of the goddess hints at her conviction that close attention to the past will reward us with wisdom. Much like the

            deep sea diver

            whose ocean floor exploratory

            has yielded ancient wrecks, glittering treasures.

A careful interest in—or rather a reverence for—the past, guides many of the journeys Kavounas makes in these poems. Her curiosity ranges from personal to political, from the microscopic to the monumental; often, it examines the interplay between the two. Of her father’s hometown Aivali, Turkey, where 150,000 ethnic Greeks were violently persecuted in the First World War, and to which, we learn, he was never to return once he had been driven out:

            Somewhere in that hinterland is more than just your farm.

            That vast expanse conceals the bodies of your parents

            left to die along with all who stumbled to their death

            their bloodline tracing forward into future generations

            extending back, and back – like all these criss-crossing lines

            on this wrinkled map.

This sense of movement (‘I’ve always been nomadic’) and, in particular, uprooting (‘Blown south by instinct, chance / and circumstance’) is pervasive. But Kavounas’ backward glance, her refusal to forget, is searching and considered. It is occasionally too personal but never nostalgic. She is aware, too, of the dangers, of the more harmful ways in which such a refusal might manifest. A friend’s mother exhumes her collection of fur coats from a refrigerator:

            The alphabetic order of it all, the idea that this roll call of the wild

            would somehow revive her, or at the very least, that these ghosts

            of creatures, trapped in the desert, could offer comfort.

            One for each day of the week, she whispered, almost to herself

What other consequences come of all this movement and contingency? For Kavounas, they raise questions of who she is and how to cross the gap between herself and other people. It is the latter she stresses most. There are desperate breakdowns in communication—with a brother, with a lover—that may or not be recovered; there is grief for a father who could never return home; and there is simple disappearance (‘utterly unforgettable people / who insist on vanishing before my waking eye’). But there is also something stoic, even hopeful, that Kavounas threads into the seams of her sentences, that remains despite all she sees in the past, and which turns our heads from yesterday to today; and also, to tomorrow. 

Samuel Bowerman 2nd July 2024

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