Monthly Archives: October 2024

Time Machines by Caroline Williamson (Vagabond Press)

Posted on October 25, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Time Machines by Caroline Williamson (Vagabond Press)

Opening with a poem set during lockdown, this book contains others about art-gallery visiting, being at poetry readings, dog-walking, and thinking about the news, family, films and writing. This makes it sound like a hundred and one first collections but, bit by bit, an autobiography builds up: a Welsh Labour MP granddad, an eccentric but beloved mum who died young, a little brother likewise, a scholarship, and a youth of peace activism with the customary hassles:

                                         […] I wonder 
            why they bothered to tap our phones: we were not the stuff
            of martyrs. But they kept it up: mysterious silences, unusual
            faults on the line. […]

Then teaching in China, migration to Australia, parenthood, more education, and getting wryly older:

            […] me and my generation,
            the survivors so far, just doing what we can
            with interesting clothes and our accumulated skills
            in politics and culture. […]

What also builds up is the nimble but conversational voice. It uses long poems with long lines to correct itself, digress, pile up phrases in apposition and ask questions to the air. It’s intensely self-conscious: ‘There were other things that could have been written here, in this stanza,’ says one poem. ‘Do I give the details?’ asks another. It includes writing tips expressed as self-discoveries (‘you can measure/ the density of the writing by the extent of the terror that precedes it’). It’s satirical about cosy murder series and Hollywood films (‘Somehow in moments/ of high drama there’s always the Stars and Stripes/ dead centre in the screen’), but chiefly about itself: ‘See – / I can feel a spasm of political commitment rising/ unstoppably from somewhere in my mind, and all/ we were talking about was clothes pegs’. What I most liked is how it conveys that oddly chatty despair about the big things that’s so contemporary

            Miserable weather he said and I said no it’s
            lovely weather for the garden and this might be
            the last cool summer ever, we will look back
            from the arid future […]
            […] and say, do you remember
            that final year of normal […]?

while carrying on, at micro-scale, a contented life

            […] We get off the tram and walk
            a few blocks to dinner with friends and also people
            we barely know. Histories of trade unions,
            the knowledge of awards, […]

Its incomer’s enthusiasms are evident in the Melbourne placenames, Australian English (‘tradies’, ‘pollie’, ‘barrack for the Dees’) and local artists/writers (Sybil Craig, Rosie Weiss, Michael Farrell); there’s even a poem, gently sceptical, about the poet’s citizenship ceremony (‘swearing/ in the gobbledegook of Empire/ to find our place on the team’). ‘I want to be disinherited,’ she says, thinking of British literary influence. Structurally, there’s lots of revisiting, right down to the feel of comfortable shoes and Gramsci’s line about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will, that matches the humorous discursiveness of the individual poems:

            My Crete poem sits there in its first draft: pencil,
            prose, incorrigibly sincere with a worrying streak
            of, horrors, can you believe it, nostalgia.

Caroline Williamson’s work was entirely new and unexpected to me (I’d initially misread Sydney’s Vagabond Press as Glasgow’s Vagabond Voices) but was a great find. Indeed, from the evidence of recent magazines (‘Dido’, in Overland, especially), it looks like it’s getting even better. 

Guy Russell 25th October 2024

Leave a comment

Posted in Australian Poetry, Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Posted on October 9, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Following his last, visionary, Faber collection Skin, published earlier this year, David Harsent’s latest publication is a simple but beautifully produced 20 page limited edition, The Tanglewood Sonnets, from Richard Skinner’s Vanguard Editions. 

It contains fourteen sonnets.  Each is composed of an opening couplet, followed by a tercet, then two stanzas of four, then five lines. The final line, often a complete sentence, can wrong-foot the reader, countering or contradicting, at times enriching what’s come before. Each has a title which picks up a word from the text.  As in this poet’s previous works, the structure as a whole works through rhythm and repetition.   

There are two unnamed characters, a ‘he’ and a ‘she’. In the first sonnet ‘Their voices sometimes match and marry’ but more often they are distanced, with the man on the outside watching the woman from afar, who is struggling through her own journey, maybe in search of a place of safety. A dreamlike narrative is developed, filmic, with shifting scenes.  A sense of unstable realities and perceptions is emphasised by phrases such as ‘it seemed she might/her understanding of it/what appears/what presents as/what’s said to…’.  Everything is suggested, yet an emotional urgency carries the narrative through the poems and the effect is cumulative, like the form itself.  

Dark images of violence, loss, anguish and despair, reappear at two levels, the intimate, within the relationship, and the wider social and political through the loss of home, migration, an apocalyptic destruction through fire.  In the first sonnet we learn ‘They were members of a cargo-cult’ and images related to such a cult recur: a spiritual search, prophecy, burning, ecstatic dance, a departure from an island, the ghosts of dead ancestors, pariah dogs. Esoteric references, with scenes of fairground (a sonnet titled ‘Freak-show’) and a maze, familiar from some of Harsent’s earlier work, also return in two of the sonnets.  In fact many of the themes, images and references echo Harsent’s earlier volumes of poetry as if they were all part of one pulsing work.

The necessity and limitations of writing as a way of comprehending reality and retaining memory, are touched on in two sonnets. The woman is at times blind and speechless but she’s making notes in a dreambook.   Sonnet IX ‘Words’ expresses some of its contradictions. In the second stanza: ‘Who owns the book must surely treasure it’, is followed in the third by:  

‘Question-marks, under-scoring, marginalia, lines

struck out…It was a long night. There are words

she no longer trusts; they have shed

their music; they say just what they mean’. 

For a poet, words that say what they mean but are without ‘music’ can be at some level untrustworthy, untruthful and, despite the ‘surely’ in the second stanza, the book is not treasured. In the final stanza there’s a house torn down, an oil-drum-fire burning what’s left, and in the last line: ‘She crosses the road and pitches the book into that’. 

Sonnet X ‘The Exchange’ is built up of a vocabulary of sounds: the woman makes a noise that ‘matches’ the dog barking (as she ‘matches’ the man in the first sonnet). There’s ‘a timbral footfall’. ‘The bird is glissando’ and ‘delirious counterpoint’. A sonnet of sounds. Yet again the last line appears to under-cut what’s gone before: ‘From a nearby room he listens to the silence’, prompting the reader to wonder, is that the silence, or his silence?

The work is strongly visual, filmic, choreographic, and as always, musical. Harsent has written libretti for Harry Birtwhistle and has spoken in interviews of how essential music is for him. In a commendation on the back cover of this pamphlet, Sean O’Brien refers to the word-choice, sentence construction and to ‘the musical undertow of the poem’. He states ‘Harsent is the poet as composer’.    

It’s hard to define the powerful effect of Harsent’s writing. It doesn’t lie in the immediate grasp of what the poem is ‘about’.  Part of the satisfaction is in re-reading the poems, to draw out their meanings, but even more it is to experience the cumulative effect of the poetry (images, sounds, intensity of emotion), all that remains with you after you’ve set the book down, and ‘the musical undertow’. 

Caroline Maldonado 9th October 2024

1 Comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

The Necessity of Poetics by Robert Sheppard (Shearsman Books)

Posted on October 2, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Necessity of Poetics by Robert Sheppard (Shearsman Books)

There is a contradiction at the heart of Robert Sheppard’s book: the fact that he declares poetics to be tentative, nomadic and provisional yet publishes his (tentative and provisional) poetics texts not only as he goes along, but now in an edition of critical pieces that stretch from 1988 to 2023. What was of the moment becomes fixed upon the page.

His 1988 text, which ends the book, remains for me the most straightforward and lucid, reasoned statement in the book. I have used it for decades to introduce the idea of poetics, of thinking about one’s own writing, to school pupils, university students and poetry group and workshop members. Those who balk at what is said in the piece have an escape route: Sheppard quite clearly states ‘It is impossible for anybody who wants to write a poetry that is politically revolutionary to write in the way most poems in Britain are written.’ [my emphasis] Point that out, along with the plethora of ‘may’s scattered throughout and those resistant to Sheppard’s critique of advertising slogans, dislike of active reading and engagement with how language works can metaphorically stand back and engage in discussion.

I’ve also used an earlier version of the much longer title piece, which expansively evidences the fact that poetics can be anything that is useful to and informs or has informed the writing under consideration. So it might be examples of other poets’ work, it might be phrases or associations that inspired or initiated the work, research in its many forms, critical reading, etc. etc. But Sheppard urges us to think about what we write rather than just write. [I actually get students to write a short definition of poetics once they have read and discussed ‘The Necessity of Poetics’ in groups. We then compare and contrast their definitions with each other and, finally, a succinct statement by Sheppard published elsewhere. Of course, this brief definition annoys them, but the wide-ranging and seemingly endless ‘Necessity’ piece is important to show the endless possibilities of poetics.]

Sheppard’s new book gathers up all sorts of poetics: critical essays that pay attention to other poets’ work, commentaries about his own work, discussions of rhythm and pulse, ekphrasis (and anti-ekphrasis), and ideas of networked poems forming a larger whole that can be read in several different ways (cf. Twentieth Century Blues), along with autobiographical pieces about his time in London and teaching at Edge Hill University. Personal experience also informs an intriguing piece ‘Critical Tuning’ which explores the idea of ‘Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing’, an attempt to explain and/or understand fragmentation, grammatical and syntactical jumps as a product of contemporary media and how we listen (or watch or browse).

For me Sheppard’s engagement with poetry once he has written it has always offered a creative freedom. Explore form and content with and through the writing, find out what you have written, edit and shape it, then work out what it is about and why you have written about it. Why have I been reading what I have? How has that work affected or influenced my writing, directly or indirectly? What do I think of my poetry today and what might I think tomorrow? And the same again the day after.

Sheppard can be reassuring but also unsettling, a provocateur and a reconciler, a (metaphorical) warmonger and a conscientious objector, a safe harbour and a wrecker attempting to draw you onto the rocks of experiment and deconstruction. The Necessity of Poetics is not a creative writing handbook or a book of explanatory criticism, neither it is an authorial defence of Sheppard’s own poetry. It is a challenge and an incitement to make it new, to engage with the possibilities of language in all shapes and forms, to realise the linguistic, social, political and aspirational uses of poetry, to think about what we are writing, what we have written, what we could write, and how we might use creativity for utopian ends.

Rupert Loydell  2nd October 2024


1 Comment

Posted in Books, Essays, Poetics and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.