One of the two epigraphs to Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems is the phrase that the poet overheard in 1953 at Black Mountain College when the cook, Cornelia Williams, said ‘All my life I’ve heard one makes many’. The phrase struck a chord with Olson and in his copy of A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality where the Ramsgate-born Mathematician and Philosopher had written ‘the term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many’ he scribbled ‘exactly Cornelia Williams, Black Mt kitchen, 1953’.
On the back of this beautifully produced new Shearsman collection of 100 short poems Fiona Wright has written ‘The small poems…slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory, of thinking and being in the world, a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines.’Or, to put it in Laurie Duggan’s words in ‘Allotment #62’:
to make much of little
where perception and act are one
each thing in its place
spread over the garden
poppy seeds of various hue
stolen from elsewhere
The delight of many of these poems, ‘Pansies’, pensées, is the sure touch of language in which that ‘perception’ and the act of the words on the page cohere to form a picture, a vignette. Some of them are just that: a picture, a photograph clicked in an instant:
a robin lands, curious
as I grub weeds
(‘Allotment #41’)
One can see the curiosity of the robin as though a head tilted to one side were there on the page; the movement from lightness of the bird to the more ponderous work of the man is caught in the contrast of sound between ‘lands’ and ‘grub’. The coherence of the picture is given to us with the dual meaning of that second word.
The connectedness between a sharply perceived ‘here’ and the shadow cast on the ground by a ‘then’ is held in
a moment’s silence
with Gael Turnbull,
Brigflatts Meeting House, 1987
later
on Hardknott Pass
November cold
(posted there
Legionaries
from Africa
(‘Allotment #49’)
The witty, almost mischievous, association between the surname of the founder of Migrant Press and the opening line of Bunting’s poem is never allowed to rest with the self-satisfaction that can come as the result of a pun; we have already moved on in time (‘later’) and the cold of the Pass bridges a ‘now’ and the builders of Hadrian’s Wall.
Laurie Duggan has an infectious awareness of history and his precision allows the reader to share moments rather like a pebble dropped in a well on the surface of which ‘stones ring.
Allotment #93
All Hallows approaches
the bar strung with rubber bats,
telescopes, astrolabes
obscure the windows.
Pepys drank in this pub
(the Thames, Wapping
above the tunnel
to Rotherhithe)
further out, rotten wharves,
hulks on the estuary bed
empty sea-forts
subject to slow rust
Ian Brinton 11th April 2014
