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Willoughby, New York by Carson Pytell (Bottlecap Press)

Posted on January 17, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Willoughby, New York by Carson Pytell (Bottlecap Press)

I love Carson Pytell’s work. It reminds me of Charles Bukowski and Fredrich Exley. It reminds me of Kevin Ridgeway and John Fante. It reminds me of the kind of fiction that a lot of us were trying to do when I lived and worked in Long Beach. So many of us who studied under Gerry Locklin and Ray Zepeda were going after a kind of gritty realism, and some of us accomplished the spirit and tone. Others did not. I never did to the degree that I wanted to, and so I shifted to different kinds of writing. Pytell, however, is a kind of master of this type of writing, and his fiction collection, Willoughby, New York is powerful work, the kind that I was reaching for back in those days. His chapbook reaches the kind of humanity most of these writers are striving for as he often focuses on people’s worst days, their most embarrassing moments and how they live through them. He is a writer who isn’t afraid to show us not only how banal life can be and how insignificant we can be made to feel but also how to live through these moments with dignity.

         The first story of the collection ‘In the North Country’ captures much of that power as a 21-year-old tries to have sex with a woman, both of whom have been placed into a facility for having attempted suicide. They sneak off to a bathroom, but when the woman finds that the protagonist was born with only one testicle, she reviles in disgust and even horror. She reveals a dark side of her character as she berates him for not being the perfect physical specimen, she’d hoped he was. He asks her what her problem is, and she replies: ‘My problem? I’m in here with a one ball wonder. You’re like seven feet tall, can’t you imagine what I was expecting?’ There is a callowness that Pytell is exploring and helping us to understand. He is taking us to that place of shallowness, showing us how to move on when confronted with these moments. Years later, the protagonist finds out that the girl he almost had sex with eventually succeeded in her suicide, and he is left trying to understand her, perhaps trying to understand his place in the horror of her life.

         Getting to this place of moral, emotional, and intellectual ambiguity is one of things that I love about Pytell’s work, what he does as well as anyone I know. In ‘Where the Line Is,’ his protagonist discusses his ambivalence about death after having gone through the last rights and recovered. He describes what he sees as a funny scene when he is alone in his hospital room and his blood gets splattered around the room. ‘As for the poor nurse who walked in on the faux murder scene, the worse off custodian, I recall their faces better than my family’s. How could I not? I laughed silently, but visibly harder than I ever had.’ His protagonists are often detached in this way, watching their lives and trying to understand them but not caught up in a maudlin concern. They understand something about the nature of life and its absurdities, and they are showing how odd it is.

         Although Pytell is part of that literary tradition I found and loved in Long Beach, he is making the work his own. It is not in imitation, and it is constantly powerful. I cannot recommend Willoughby, New York more highly. 

John Brantingham 17th January 2023

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Darkness Between Stars by John F. Deane & James Harpur (The Irish Pages Press)

Posted on January 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Darkness Between Stars by John F. Deane & James Harpur (The Irish Pages Press)

The authors’ own Introduction to this beautifully produced hardback book notes that Deane and Harpur 

   have known each other for many years and shared readings, 
   discussions and introduced each other’s work, finding friendship
   and mutual encouragement in discovering that [they] were both 
   fascinated not only by the life of poetry but also by the divine, 
   the sacred, ‘God’.

It is this fascination, and the writing out of it, which underpins this ‘joint selection’ of poems: although there are poems about a wide range of subjects, they are, the authors suggest, ‘poems in search of God’, poems which ‘bear witness to […] probings into the ineffable’.

This raises two issues. Firstly, I hoped for more of a poetic conversation, and not a selection of poems by each author, the one followed by the other; perhaps even new work, produced in collaboration or as a direct response to the other’s work. Secondly, an issue the authors are all too clearly aware of, that faith rooted in specific religion is somewhat out of fashion, as is the idea (put forward in the Introduction) that poetry ‘springs from our argument with God, or the absence of God.’ 

I find the idea of poetry somehow being inspired by the divine or a muse, somewhat antiquated, as I do ‘the search for meaning, for certainties’, which the authors suggest (again in their Introduction) has never been more important, particularly as a result of Covid, but also generally. I am not alone, however, in accepting the notion of truths, plural, rather than Truth, isolate and declamatory. Recent developments in the sciences, engineering, the arts, psychology and sociology have shown us how much knowledge is tentative and of its time, rather than fixed, final and certain.

It would be wrong to suggest that Deane and Harpur are in any way dogmatic, evangelical or theologically certain: both write poems that question and consider, even when addressing the divine directly, both doubt and debate. Although Harpur’s poem ‘from St Symeon Stylites’ is about and perhaps spoken by St. Symeon, we might consider the poet’s voice too, admitting that 

   Most days I think I’m split in two, 
   A spirit yearning for the light
   And a body of delinquent appetites.

That phrase, ‘delinquent appetites’ seems to be both enticing and full of self-disgust, and although the poem is full of lonely, resistant prayer it ends up with a doubting question: ‘Sometimes I wonder if I pray / To keep the Lord away?’

Deane often explores his belief and doubt through revisions of the Gospel stories. ‘Words of the Unknown Soldier’ notes, in very un-soldier-like language,  how ‘he stumped us, this Jesus of yours, with his / walking on water, fandango, entrechat, glissade’, whilst the lengthy sonnet sequence ‘According to Lydia’ brings a feminine point-of-view to bear on key moments, finally countering imagined ‘onslaughts of foolishness’ with the beatitudinal ‘blessed is the one who does not lose faith in me.’

Mostly, however, both authors choose to see or encounter the divine reflected or present in the physical world around them. Bones, birds, star clusters, woods and corn circles are all cause to stop and consider man’s place in the grand scheme of things. In fact, man’s relationship to the natural world, and even more specifically the ‘Christian failure to incorporate the reality of evolution and its consequences’ is what Deane suggests has ‘alienated thinking people’ from ‘”traditional” religious tenets and activities.’

‘Poetry, God and the Imagination: a Dialogue’, actually a 2018 email correspondence, ends the book, and in many ways it is the best part, offering up a frank and thoughtful discussion to the reader. Deane’s Catholicism, or at least his Catholic upbringing, is very much on show as he suggests that ‘To accept evolution is inevitably to deny the doctrine of “original sin” and even that of the “Immaculate Conception”. I don’t know about the latter as that veers off into ridiculous discussions about human purity, virginity and sexlessness, but the former was always explained to me, by the Baptist church I attended as a child, as a matter of relationship to God, not a physical genetic inheritance!

The discussion is wide-ranging, covering the spiritual, the poetic and writerly,  as well as religious institutions and mystical theology. Surprisingly, Deane turns out to be ‘a devoted follower’ of Teilhard de Chardin, the author of a cosmic theology informed by both evolution and philosophy, whilst Harpur prefers ‘a multi-construct Christ figure’ although he admits to mostly trying to focus on his ‘own interior silence’.

Both seem to agree that religion is ‘rooted in mystery, epiphany and personal experience’ and rather worrying that ‘that’s what it shared with poetry.’ Or should, because Deane is adamant that ‘too much contemporary poetry […] seems vapid and imitative, saying nothing and saying it well.’ In the same way, he notes that ‘it has always amazed me how the churches got it wrong’, although later he redirects the discussion because ‘we are not going to get too far with the theological and rational surveying of the world and poetry.’

Later on there are mentions of Simone Weil, Richard Rohr, Yeats and Hopkins, but the main drift of the conversation seems to be towards a critique of poetry that society thinks can be measured in financial terms, and then a suggestion that the mystical, inspired or ineffable is a counter to this. Whilst I agree that Western neoliberal capitalism and the measuring of anything only in terms of profit, potential or otherwise, is wrong, poetry has always had more cultural than financial value. I do not, however, want creative writing made mystical. Language is what we use to think and talk to each other, it is how we process the world; when we recognise how fluid and full of possibility it is, we can create anew. Whilst much of the poetry here is beautifully worked, thoughtful and intriguing, it does not in the main evidence what many of us would think of as a ‘radical approach’ which Deane suggests is needed. The re-mystification and obscuration of poetry and how it can or might be written does no-one any favours.

Rupert Loydell 11th January 2023


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A Census of Preconceptions by Oz Hardwick (Survision Books)

Posted on January 9, 2023 by tearsinthefence
A Census of Preconceptions by Oz Hardwick (Survision Books)

Oz Hardwick prose poems are short moments captured from what the author, in ‘Out of Town’, says is ‘Beyond the range of church bells’, where ‘time follows its own instincts’. These gently surreal poems slur time, jump time, and revel in experiential time, where action ceases or slows, allowing the poet time to breathe, take note, follow trains and trails of thought and share them with his readers.

In ‘The Coming of the Comet’, for instance, the original observation of the comet’s trails as ‘fragmented nursery rhymes’ (sky writing) allows the author to imagine reaching up to touch them, although he fears getting his fingers burnt, metaphorically and literally. Then the text undertakes a sideways move towards the ducks who have already flown away from the winter, which allows a digression about other creatures, before the poem swerves into myth and nursery rhymes, with a dying dragon returning us to the burning motif. All that in half a page!

Other poems in this collection are calmer and static. ‘Rain Fugue’ is just that, an ode to the past, lost love, triggered by association with bad weather; whilst ‘The Museum of Silence’ imagines the titular organization as a repository of items such as ’empty headlines, snapped violin strings’, ‘the pressure of gentle arms and the electricity of soft hair falling across eyelids’. The left-unsaid contradiction is the fact that the museum, where ‘There are never any words’, can only be conjured up through the author’s careful arrangement of words.

Elsewhere, there is a gentle humour with a serious undertow: ‘When we stopped wearing watches, our hands became lighter’ (‘The Evolutionary Urge’), ‘In the absence of clear government guidelines, I’ve convinced myself that angels are everywhere’ (‘Epihanies for All’), ‘I’ve changed the locks and changed my mind’ (‘imdb’), ‘Before he moved out, the previous owner hid a volcano in the house’ (‘The Armchair Volcanologist’). The poems are not the slightest bit incendiary though, although they do surprise and occasionally shock. ‘Swarm’, for instance, observes that ‘Bodies break up every day, but still we’re surprised when it happens to us’, before riffing on the idea of a search for ‘an appropriate image’. How to commemorate nothingness, or absence, the fleetingness of life in the grand scheme of things, even when there might be ‘sweetness at the heart of our shattering’?

These are poems where ‘Difficult questions push between simple gestures’ (‘Highway Blues’) and ‘Graveyards are the new shopping malls’ where visitors are ‘browsing their quiet aisles, comparing prices and window-shopping afterlives’. This set-up at the beginning of ‘Bargain’ allows Hardwick, or the poem’s narrator, a chance to remember, countering the fact that his ‘own family leave no trace’. He recalls a religious cult leafletting student groups, the notion of ‘a loving god whose face is too bright to see clearly’, and rescues his family from oblivion, before asking about ‘rest and redemption, about spreading payments, and about insurance in case of cancellation due to unforeseen circumstances’. The deity only offers him a brochure which contains only ‘a list of names printed in invisible ink’ inside it.

But this is not a dour or miserable book. Yes, it reflects upon death, beliefs, and doubts, but mostly it is full of joyous associations and playful observations, delightful moments and wonders from the world that readers can share. As Hardwick says in ‘Please Make Up My Room’, ‘Just because they are in your handwriting doesn’t mean they are necessarily your words’, and I guess the reverse is true: these words can become ours.

Rupert Loydell 9th January 2023

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Jane’s Country Year by Malcolm Saville (Handheld Press)

Posted on January 8, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Jane’s Country Year by Malcolm Saville (Handheld Press)

Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine Five books were part of my growing up, a more literate successor (along with Arthur Ransome’s Swallows & Amazons books) to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, which I loved but raced through. Saville never got much recognition for his writing for children, and only recently did I discover the Lone Pine Five paperbacks I collected (and still have) often had a quarter or more of the story removed since their initial hardback publications.

There are several publishers in recent years who have been reprinting out-of-print books, marketing them to nostalgic adults keen to revisit their past, but Handheld Books – who are new to me – are not one of these. Until now they have been reissuing books by the likes of Rose Macualay, John Buchan, Sylvia Townsend Warner and other authors I have never heard of. But their ‘Handheld Classic 24’ is this stand-alone novel-come-nature book by Saville.

It’s a beautiful edition, with reproductions of the original illustrations included, and a new foreword contextualising the 1946 story for 21st Century readers. Hazel Sheeky Bird makes links between Saville and the likes of Blyton, notes his critical neglect, but also details how important the likes of Richard Jefferies’ book Bevis was to Saville. 

Organised into twelve chapters, one for each month of the year, Jane is sent to recuperate on her uncle’s farm after a long illness in the city. There, she not only becomes well but is introduced to nature, farming, and country life, making new friends and gaining information as she goes. From the first few pages on there is a sense of wonder at the open spaces, the weather, and how people live. Her inquisitiveness is informed by her new friends, the shepherd, the farm labourer – who she at first thinks is a tramp, and the Parson’s family, not to mention her aunt and uncle.

Some of these ‘information drops’ are a little awkward, but they are redeemed by the knowledge a reader gains, and the overall narrative arc; and Bird notes that explanatory notes which were added to later editions have been removed for this edition, which returns the book to its original form. The other slight problem is the sometimes condescending and clichéd description of villagers and workers as plain simple folk, somehow more honest, open and true than the city or town folk who live where Jane and her parents live.

It is also an era where farmers were farmers, not industrial livestock or vegetable producers. Jane’s uncle keeps sheep, grows vegetables, and milks and slaughters his cattle; although he goes to market, works hard and works his employees hard, the focus of his work is what his land can produce to sustain his family and those who work on it, whilst looking after his fields and animals.

Saville did not write this novel as a polemic though, he wanted to tell a story that engaged his readers, and saw the lead character Jane, get well, mature, and learn. The pace is varied as suits the changing seasons, with some wonderful set scenes around events such as first lambing, harvest, the local fair and Christmas, various interactions with other people, and a number of epistolic sections which reproduce Jane’s letters to her (rather distant) parents. The pace is gentle and meandering, the story fairly simple, but Saville sustains the mood of engagement and wonder throughout. The pictures are a genuine bonus, and I greatly enjoyed learning about the recent historical past, however romanticised, and sharing the delight of Jane’s year in the country.

Rupert Loydell 8th January 2023

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Visions of Llandaff poems by John Freeman photographs by Chris Humphrey (The Lonely Press)

Posted on December 18, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Visions of Llandaff poems by John Freeman photographs by Chris Humphrey (The Lonely Press)

This superb collection of poems, each one accompanied by Chris Humphrey’s impressive colour photographs, comprises observations about different walks written in sections that are linked by landscape, small journeys, reflections and moments of vision that are ‘undramatic and intangible but real’.

With ‘Words Inside a Birthday Card’ the poet begins his journey with a choice, for one ‘can go three ways’: alongside a wall, into a churchyard with yew trees or straight ahead towards the river although time is too short and the weather too cold to appreciate the mallards ‘swimming, flying’. Yet he does stop for a robin is singing ‘and going on singing’, a continuity that brings in ‘other birds singing’ so that anyone watching will find they need to listen and go on listening.

A description of insects, halfway to wasps in size, introduces a hint of heaven for they are like ‘a ladder of angels ascending and descending beside the robin’s tall tree’ – a welcome sight for they are ‘part of the livingness of the world’ and, together with all the opening and growing of buds and leaves, cause the first of the changes in the narrator for he, who had been ‘impatient and depressed’ finds the dark mood falling away.

The next section is intriguingly named ‘A Lost View’ which, for years, has been remembered and looked for in vain. Other views of Llandaff are ‘lovely’ but ‘not what I remember’. The discovery, when it happens, occurs accidently while the poet is ‘intent on water’ and this in turn reminds him of Shelley who wrote about his own journeying ‘I always go on until I am stopped, full stop, and I never am stopped, full stop’. 

The title section ‘Visions of Llandaff’ begins with ‘Summer rain on leaves and old stone.’ There is much to see but more important than the seeing is ‘the feeling’ of a ‘soft fellowship in which things bloom and are tenderly magnified’ – a special way of feeling which seems to be offered as a gift and, if one is distracted by lesser things, can be ‘rerun’ again ‘in thought’ together with a resolution to do better ‘with the next gift that is offered.’ This is the heart of the vision in the collection’s title, a reference to fragments that can still be gathered up, a ‘transfiguring’ remembered from ‘an intense early version’ when, as a lonely adolescent, the author kept company with a squirrel that was ‘the one other unrooted thing’ in a landscape of an old castle ‘surrounded by tall trees and a soft rain’.

If the fragments of insight, the seeing and the feeling, are the heart of the poet’s vision, then the Cathedral with ‘the elegant gold cockerel on the spire’ is the focal point. For once, he says, ‘I don’t just see, I register this incarnation of the divine as human’. Or maybe it’s not the building that is central but the outside, the rain on the steps, the weeds, and plants, ‘masses of luxuriant wet growth’, the impression ‘that I have, for all my inattention, completed something.’ 

The completion of a sequence of beautiful poems, certainly. John Freeman, as always, shows himself to be an outstanding poet. But there is something about this sequence which, to me, feels more haunting than usual, a joyful vision but one that is also fugitive and sad. Yet, the ending is clear. A candle is lit in a ritual that is not hollow. A path leads through ‘a tunnel of buddleia’. Something has happened and changed. ‘The space is not empty.’

Mandy Pannett 18th December 2022

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Far World From Silesia by Jeremy Hilton (Brimstone Press)

Posted on November 27, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Far World From Silesia by Jeremy Hilton (Brimstone Press)

Jeremy Hilton’s latest book offers ‘an exploration in prose and verse of the life and works of Emin Pasha’. It provides a portrait of the nineteenth-century explorer and naturalist via a biography in prose, extracts from his journals, and in a long poem. 

Emin is probably best remembered as the man H. M. Stanley crossed the Congo to try to rescue in the late 1880s. He was born Eduard Schnitzer, in Upper Silesia in Prussia, but spent much of his life in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, working as a doctor and diplomat. He adopted the name Emin, meaning ‘trustworthy’ or ‘faithful’, to facilitate integration into Ottoman society. 

His major passion in life was natural history, especially birds. He was an extraordinary individual, tirelessly observing, documenting and collecting. He corresponded with many scientific editors and contributed specimens of flora and fauna to natural history museums across Europe. He was also a man of humanitarian sentiments and interested in the lives of the people he lived among.

In 1876 Emin arrived in Sudan, where the British were supporting Egyptian (Ottoman) rule. Here General Gordon, the senior local official, appointed him governor of Equatoria province in the south of the territory. Egyptian/British control of Sudan collapsed in the 1880s in the face of an Islamist-led nationalist revolt. Emin and the people under his protection were forced south towards the largely unexplored Lake Albert region. The outside world lost track of him and this led to Stanley’s disastrous, and much written about, expedition. Emin eventually met a brutal death in the Congo rainforests in 1892 at the hands of Arab slave traders. 

The three narrative threads of Hilton’s book – biography, poem, journal extracts – run in parallel columns down the page which is large format (A3 landscape). The text is illustrated with maps, and with photographs of some of the birds and other creatures Emin recorded in Africa. The journal entries in particular give a strong sense of Emin’s intellectual inquisitiveness and energy, and are an interesting read. The biographical material, on the other hand, seemed to me over long. The information provided is readily available from other sources, and a shorter introduction to Emin’s life, sufficient to elucidate the poem, might perhaps have been enough. 

The poem itself draws on Emin’s writings, collaging material to convey his passions and travails. Much of the poem focuses on his time in Sudan and central Africa. There are 45 stanzas, each of eight lines. The meeting between Stanley and Emin is described in stanza 33 which begins:

close to the lake two men meet in a tent

men of renown, rescued and rescuer, roles reversed

one weary from hundreds of miles of his forces dying

hearing the groans and cries in a forest with no light

the other riding his steamboat with fresh supplies

The poem overall conveys a strong sense of physical hardship, of armed conflict, sickness, food scarcity, as well as of a landscape teeming with wildlife. Stanza 30 reads:

out of the river dream the mystery spreads

growing into our very lives, the too soon deaths

pushing back the frontiers of our unknowing

hills and mountains to traverse, rivers to wade

forests to scramble through, stealing venom of snakes

roads leading skyward among the arrows and falcons

all down the drought-threatened flyways, flash

of a kingfisher in front of lakeside crags

and drown into the earth of an ancient hallowing

Using Emin’s words has its drawbacks, as the poem inevitably becomes inflected at times with a nineteenth-century colonialist language. In stanza 18 Emin wonders:

how is this throbbing

chaos, this crunch of bright and dark visions

tropical lightning sheeting crazy malarial nights

to be governed, to be granted the music of peace

Specific experiences are generalized to ‘Africa’, creating an image of a continent ravaged by tribal wars, famine and disease – a benighted place needing the civilizing influence of colonial authority to bring order. There certainly was conflict, disease (including smallpox introduced by Europeans), food shortages in particular areas in particular periods, an active slave trade, but these need contextualizing. Gordon, who was a fierce opponent of the slave trade, soon realised that the task he had been given in Sudan was hopeless. With large lucrative slave markets in Cairo and Constantinople there would always be people trying to supply the demand. The wealthy Ottoman elite for whom Gordon, and Emin, worked, and who were supported by Britain, benefited from this trade. This perspective is largely missing from Far World From Silesia.

In a postscript Hilton tells us that he has never been to Africa. He confesses, with characteristic honesty, to a ‘large degree of humility, indeed embarrassment’ that he should attempt such a work. He voices some criticisms of Emin in the postscripts, recognizing that he was a colonialist with a somewhat paternalistic attitude to Africans, that he helped facilitate the trade in ivory – but he argues that Emin’s life and work as a naturalist deserve our attention.

Knowing Jeremy Hilton, I have no doubt at all that he is motivated by humanitarian and environmental concerns. If the book prompts readers to seek out more information about Emin and the events he witnessed, it will have served a valuable purpose. Most people in Britain remain ignorant of the realities of our historical relationship with the continent, with the so called ‘anti-woke’ brigade determined to try and keep it that way. This book could have done more to puncture some of the myths, but Emin’s contribution to surveying the flora and fauna of Africa, thereby helping to lay the foundations of modern-day conservation work, is well worth knowing about. This was his enduring legacy and Hilton is right to celebrate it.

Simon Collings 27th November 2022

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Aeneid Books VI -XII by Virgil translated by David Hadbawnik (Shearsman Books)

Posted on November 22, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Aeneid Books VI -XII by Virgil translated by David Hadbawnik (Shearsman Books)

To Virgil, the second half of his epic of Roman imperial destiny and its human cost was the maius opus (‘greater work’). The long voyaging from fallen Troy is over. Aeneas has accepted his ineluctabile fatum, arrived in an Italy already thickly settled with both migrated and autochthonous peoples, and wants land to settle and found his city. There are moments of respite: feasting, aetiological storytelling, divine portents and the extended ekphrasis of Aeneas’ God-made shield. But mostly it’s war: siege, raid, council, treaty, mass funerals and constant one-on-one combat. 

The emotional power of this, the Aeneid’s Iliadic half, accumulates iteratively. The relentless and grisly scenes in which, over and over, a character is given a mini-biog only to ‘vomit thick gore’ or have ‘his face […] covered in hot brains’ a few lines later, becomes sickening as well as pitiable. The pity is reinforced by scenes of grieving loved ones wishing for death themselves, even while each killing inspires yet more vengeful bloodbaths. The poem famously ends with a maddened Aeneas’ refusal of mercy, and its last image of battlefield murder sends us back to the real world without consolation or excuse. 

This interesting new translation gives us an Aeneid that’s Americanized (‘mom’, ‘my ass’, ‘pledge allegiance to the flag’, &c.), film-friendly (‘Zoom in on Lavinia’), humorously anachronistic, hyper-dramatized (‘“Drop what you’re doing!” screams Vulcan.’) and considerably abridged. It bypasses several whole scenes and a massive chunk of Book VII, besides countless smaller details. Many battlefield deaths, notably, become mere name-lists, soft-pedalling the horror that’s the flipside of the epic concept of glory. 

The style is richly and sometimes brilliantly idiomatic. ‘Cum tandem tempore capto/ […] Arruns’ (lit: ‘when finally, having seized the moment, Arruns…’), for instance, becomes ‘This is the break Arruns has been waiting for.’ Indents, spacing and typography stand in for the elaborate soundplay, caesurae and positional emphases of the Latin hexameters:

          When he thinks        the enemy’s
                       close enough PALLAS
                                     moves first     hoping
                        for anything that might            improve
                        the odds […]

The word virtus (bravery, manliness) gets left untranslated, along with occasional other source terms, either to flag significance or for atmospherics. Classical buffs might miss the gratifications of Roman oratory: the most frequent rhetorical device here is cacamphaton (‘What the/   actual/    fuck,’ says Juno). ‘Tough’ is the favourite translation word – the warrior queen Camilla, for instance, is a ‘tough babe’.  

The colloquial parlance co-exists nonetheless with a traditional high-flown register (‘Why/ does fate urge you to unknown war’ &c.), which generates abrupt tonal changes. When Tarchon addresses his men: ‘Now O chosen guys’, the registral discord reaches parodic levels, and when we’re told Evander ‘spews forth’ his poignant farewell to his son, and then ‘blacks out’, it’s patently self-conscious flippancy rather than tonal lapse. This translator, recasting the Aeneid as part-comedy, part-Hollywood blockbuster, is propounding that we (or he) can’t take heroic epic seriously nowadays, and is willing to burlesque the horror and pity in order to subvert its martial vanities, while transposing it to genres more accessible to a contemporary audience. It’s undoubtedly a valid approach. The result feels like it was fun to write, is certainly more fun to read than twenty po-faced translations, and adds an innovative new ribbon to the rich braid of Virgilian studies. Just maybe don’t make it the only Aeneid you read.

Guy Russell 22nd November 2022

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Seige and Symphony by Myra Schneider (Second Light Publications)

Posted on November 19, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Seige and Symphony by Myra Schneider (Second Light Publications)

     In her latest collection, Myra Schneider uses poetical language to investigate our difficult times. Her lines develop concerns and thoughts in expanded imageries that search for new paths. Her detailed observations give a clear and multi-layered vision of the arguments she explores. Nature is often at the fore and helps us to understand our situation and our role on the planet and what it means to be human. Environmental concerns and the everyday struggle to survive in this troubled period are therefore paramount; Schneider’s response is complex and expertly nuanced but eventually positive. We will survive despite conflicts, depression, oppressions, failures and fragilities and the damage we are inflicting on the planet. We will survive even though the situation may look hopeless. In the final lines of some of her poems the message about having faith in the renewal of humanity is constant and undeniable, allowing the reader to rethink and ponder on major issue with fresh eyes:

the light still reaching us from the early universe,

darkness splitting apart to let morning be born,

rain filling puddle and sea, the will to survive stored

in ovaries, love, minds mastering the beauty 

of mathematics, this poignant arch which rises

in the silence beyond the leaning walls of the nave.   (‘Cropthorne Church’)

in spite of hungers, uprootings, in spite of losses 

too deep to name, the will to live persists.     (‘Thrust’)

     Her words are generous and frank, ‘not fabrications easy as eiderdowns // that prettify lies’; they are passionate, ‘tough words’ that dissect and amplify meanings, unleashing the potential of the imagination. They defy darkness and celebrate colours, especially the colour green: 

[…] It’s a green spawned 

by the damp bedded in rotting logs and deep

leaf mush, a green that’s been so mothered

by light it banishes lighlessness, a green

more potent than the science which explains it,

a green which fills my mind, feeds my arteries,

a green that urges: never give up.         (‘Cushion Moss’)

     Some of the poems in the collection are ekphrases that evoke paintings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Stanley Spencer, J.M.W. Turner, Henri Rousseau and Henry Moore and prints by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. The ekphrastic poems catch the essence of the artists’ message and go beyond it, playing freely with the pictures in loose, sensuous descriptions; they penetrate the inner meaning of the artwork, connecting with the poet’s experience in an exchange that creates memorable lines, such as those about the vitality of Hokusai’s ‘The Horse-Washing Waterfall’ in which ‘movement is everything.’ 

     The fourth section, ‘Siege and Symphony’, is dedicated to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C Major, also called ‘Leningrad’ as it was performed for the first time in Leningrad in March 1942 when the city was under siege by the Nazi army. The symphony became a symbol of resistance to oppression and totalitarianism. Half a million people died in the siege, which lasted more than two years. The symphony is considered to be a response to this invasion, though part of it was probably conceived before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The famous ‘invasion theme’ and later dramatic movements express the sufferings caused by tyranny and the resilient opposition to it. 

     Schneider’s long poem is formed of fifteen parts that retrace the story of the composition and of the performance, drawing inspiration from primary sources that add unexpected, interesting details to the narrative. The destruction of the war dramatically mingles with the quotidian the different characters experience. The poem also links to more recent conflicts, such as the Syrian war, encompassing ‘meanings / which travel far beyond Hitler’s war.’ Despair and chaos seem to pervade the music and the city, where ‘Bodies lie hard as rocks in the snow’ and ‘Death crouches in corners and doorways’. These conditions are reflected in the weakness of the conductor and the musicians, who are starving during the rehearsals and the final performance. The ending is moving and glorious: ‘utter silence, then a storm of clapping’ spread in the audience and beyond, reaching the German troops as well. Marigolds and cornflowers are offered at the end in a triumph of colours that envisages a more hopeful future. The poem therefore appropriately ends this multifaceted collection that addresses different and complex arguments; it encompasses personal experiences and global issues and suggests possible positive solutions in which humanity is eventually rescued from total destruction. The vision is compelling, passionate and compassionate. 

Carla Scarano D’Antonio 19th November 2022

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Trilce by César Vallejo Translated by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (Shearsman Books)

Posted on November 5, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Trilce by César Vallejo Translated by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (Shearsman Books)

This very timely book marks a century from the first publication of Trilce in 1922. The cover boldly hails this as a ‘masterpiece’, of a significance in Latin and Spanish letters to match The Waste Land and The Cantos of Western Europe. I find that a bit strong and unsustainable, although Trilce breaks new ground, certainly looking a lot more experimental than it would now. In many ways it must be acknowledged its significant place, perhaps in that sense of The Cantos of being just a bit difficult to read, but one of those titles it would almost be irresponsible to overlook. Vallejo was an admirer of Ruben Dario; others find certain resonances not inconsistent with Whitman.

Much of Vallejo’s interest is that he breaks with tradition. He had a fondness for neologisms such as the chosen title, the most plausible reading of this is perhaps a combining of ‘triste’ (sad) and ‘dulce’ (sweet) from the Spanish. There is that sense that the book was likely ahead of its time, and in many ways has a style of diction comparable perhaps to US writing of the ‘50s and ‘60s, rather more so than with the highly effusive if not unchained Whitman.

It should be acknowledged that this is essentially a centennial reprint of a translation that was first done in 2005, and then included in a Complete Poems of 2012; accomplished by Irish poet Michael Smith and Peruvian Valentino Gianuzzi. Probably the most significant alternative take would be that of Clayton Eshleman.

In a very informative Introduction to the poems a number of substantive observations are made. We should note that by 1922 Vallejo was just 30. Vallejo was the youngest of 12 children, some of whom he was very close to. His relationships with women were also consequential, they ‘were not few’ (pxvii) including Otilia Villaneuva, the predominant affair, and Zoila Rosa Cuadra.

These factors and his mother’s death in 1918 had a decided bearing; equally Vallejo got involved in a public dispute involving his creative friends, and ended up in jail for 112 days. After release he was soon to leave Peru, with no going back, in 1923, when he left for Paris. There is some indication that ‘Trilce’s import was not immediately recognised and would only later emerge. Vallejo may very well be the finest of Peruvian poets, land of the Incas, although in the Pacific, Peru warred with Chile, a

hospitable place for poets, in which the latter tended to prevail.

The work eschews standard poetic forms, including rhyme, as Whitman did. The work consists of some 77 poems. There is the intimation of a strong ego, the ‘I’, but it is not especially introspective. The current book, helpfully, is bilingual, Spanish to the left.

I think comparing Vallejo to Eliot and Pound is a bit strong. There is not the guidance toward construction, nor that many highly memorable coinings or phrasing. But to Vallejo’s credit he has an air of difficulty and authenticity, some darker passages (one might compare the rather unlike Chilean Neruda) and an immersion in words. It might be suggested that levelling this text up against The Waste Land is not going to be very productive, whereas a comparison with other Latin poets, like Neruda, might be.

There is almost an unsparing quality, and Vallejo’s life was perhaps not at an altogether benign spot at the time. Here for instance is a stanza from poem XXVII;-

               The surge that knows not how it’s going,

            gives me fear, terror.

            Valiant memory, I won’t go on.

            Fair and sad skeleton, hiss, hiss.    (end p61)

Vallejo is unafraid of letting the darkness in, of examining it. He, creditably, does not seem to be going out of his way to please or placate the reader.

Vallejo, as Orrego remarked in his 1922 introduction (published for the first time here in translation) ‘strips his poetic expression of all hints of rhetoric’ (p202), such was its stylistic advance at the time. Vallejo took on convention, sometimes in ways that might have affected his work;- here is poem XLV;-

                  Let us always go out. Let us taste

            the stupendous song, the song uttered

            by the lower lips of desire. 

            O prodigious maidenhood.

            The saltless breeze goes by.   (p101)

I think there is little doubt that ‘Trilce’ amounts to being one of the most important Latin poems of the 20th Century. Yet he is that bit inimitable. The ego does come to be asserted, probably less so than in the prodigious Whitman, although it’s to cite American context, rather more out of the New American poets, and certainly very far off Language and conceptual poetry. I’m inclined to place him for Latin relevance alongside Neruda, Paz, Huidobro and Mistral and very likely Dario and perhaps de Rokha. Ironically Vallejo’s trailblazing innovations have by now seemed quite absorbed, used and recognised. But the book is a landmark and certainly essential to Latin poetry, rendered here in a very attentive and capable translation.

Clark Allison 5th November 2022

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A Friendship In Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life by Jack Miles & Mark C Taylor (Columbia University Press)

Posted on November 4, 2022 by tearsinthefence
A Friendship In Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life by Jack Miles & Mark C Taylor (Columbia University Press)

Mark C. Taylor is, according to Wikipedia, ‘a postmodern religious and cultural critic. He has published more than twenty books on theology, metaphysics, art and architecture, media, technology, economics, and postmodernity.’ That means he comes at these things mostly as a philosopher, his theology informed by and dependent upon language and thought and art, more Wittgenstein than study of religious texts. That Wikidescription doesn’t really do him justice: his books include studies of tattooing and piercing, specific conceptual and avant-garde artists, landscape design, the notion of silence, human perception of time, network cultures, pedagogy and the nature of universities, and Imagologies was one of the first books of media philosophy, written collaboratively about the then-developing internet and digital technologies. This man clearly thinks and thinks clearly about everything. 

Since 2004’s Grave Matters there have been a number of publications dealing with death, including Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living (2009), Last Works: Lessons in Leaving (2018) and Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity and Death (also 2018). Like much of his work these are difficult books which deconstruct and process ideas, often using the theories of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Hegel and Derrida (who Taylor knew).  A Friendship in Twilight is perhaps part of this series of books, but it is also something different.

The back cover blurb suggests the book is Miles and Taylor’s ‘plague journal’, a series of ‘raw and searching letters’, which reflect on (American) politics, the pandemic, catastrophe, literature, art, life and death. I’m not sure I’d call the writing raw, but it is intelligent and questioning, and the dialogue is intriguing, with Miles, a professor of religious studies and a former Jesuit, in many ways a more traditional believer than Taylor’s philosophical stance allows.

Neither, however, offer platitude or emotion as a way to talk to each other. If anything, the book suffers from the opposite, to the extent I longed for a bit of everyday joshing along with the high-flying references, allusions and debate. In a discussion about the construction of memory and recall of same, Miles tells Taylor that ‘[y]our intriguing connection of algorithm and olfaction reminds me, too, that in the human brain, the amygdala, controlling olfaction, is close to the memory centre, which is why scent is so powerfully able to evoke memory. Or so it has been argued.’ Well, yes, smell is a strong trigger for memories, along with music.

Elsewhere there is serious debate about Trump [remember him?], the spread of covid, and death. ‘Eternity and nothingness – two sides of the same coin’ says Taylor, before moving his discussion across the topics of black holes, cosmic webs, finite minds and infinity, ending his letter with a brief description of his garden and ‘the harsh winter that lies ahead’. Miles offers a robust reply, noting that Taylor’s ‘intellectual bias is always away from individual agency and toward large processes, either imponderable in principle or else perceptible by a visionary few.’ This, continues Miles, means that ‘rather than seeing fascism as the work of fascists, you [Taylor] elaborated a vision of technological determinism yielding political outcomes.’ Miles ‘own bias’ is ‘toward personal rather than impersonal agency’.

It’s heady stuff, and if at times it is rather elevated and academic, this correspondence clearly offered a lifeline of thoughtful dialogue rooted in long-term friendship which helped offset both the difficulties of life in lockdown, and the awareness that ‘It’s always a question of time. The clock is ticking-ticking for you, for me, for people lying in hospital beds, and ticking for the planet.’ Taylor has been seriously ill in the last few years and it has clearly affected him, along with much that was happening politically, socially and naturally. But Taylor is not simply raging against the dying of the light, he and his friend Jack Miles are still both thinking hard and offering us their opinions, processes, ideas and conclusions to the perplexing questions they feel enabled and challenged to answer.

Rupert Loydell 4th November 2022

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