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The Wine Cup: Twenty-four drinking songs for Tao Yuanming by Richard Berengarten (Shearsman Chapbook)

Posted on February 5, 2023 by tearsinthefence
The Wine Cup: Twenty-four drinking songs for Tao Yuanming by Richard Berengarten (Shearsman Chapbook)

I haven’t engaged with any of Richard Berengarten’s poetry for some time and I’m glad to say that my re-encounter has been a pleasant one. These poems have a wide cultural background aside from the obvious Chinese connection and I’m straightaway reminded of Berengarten’s technical abilities as these are very skilfully put-together poems and strict forms suit his kind of poetry. He’s old-school and I don’t mean that a criticism but these poems, although concerned with mortality, a constant theme in his work, are full of life and musical vigour. Each villanelle is prefaced by an italicised quotation translated into English from Tao Yuanming as indicated in the postscript:

          Dusts

               My gaze drifts over the west garden

          Where the hibiscus blooms – brilliant red

          Now this thatched cottage is my hermitage,

          Following quiet woodland paths seems best.

          Against oncoming night, why rant or rage?

          When young I was half-blinded in a cage

          Of city-dust and rubbish, hope possessed.

          Now this thatched cottage is my hermitage

          Seventy-five and still I earn my wage

          By piecemeal work, with scant let-up or rest.

          Against oncoming night, why rant or rage?

          What point is there in shouting, at my age?

          I grin, breathe deep, walk by, like any guest.

          Now this thatched cottage is my hermitage.

          My heart beats on against its old ribcage.

          To touch the moment passing, that’s the test

          Against oncoming night. Why rant or rage?

          A hundred years – our fate and heritage.

          Considering that, I’m nothing if not blessed.

          Now this thatched cottage is my heritage,

          Against oncoming night, why rant or rage?

There’s an obvious reference to Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle….’  and the shift in perspective is quite moving in the sense that Thomas died at a relatively young age while Berengarten is now a much older man. I wouldn’t say the above has resignation but there’s certainly a mellowing of tone and while some of the poems in this suite include elements of anxiety and perhaps even fear, as in ‘Scattered, My Books’ with its ‘Shall I go mad? Heart drums and temples pound. / The dead awaken. Ghosts rise to the brink. / Scattered, my books and brushes lie around’ the overall sense I’m getting is one of celebration and a restful melancholy.

     There are hintings towards Yeats and D.H. Lawrence here as well as the Chinese poets I’m less familiar with and Berengartens’ work is always full of awareness of tradition and artistic precedents. As has been suggested it is common for even contemporary poets to use and refer to the sonnet form but less so in the case of the villanelle. I can only think of two recent examples of contemporary poets who have done so in any sustained, thematic way and these are Alasdair Paterson and John Kinsella.

     The final poem in this collection underlines the drinking theme and celebrates the natural world and the here-and-now in a manner which though full of intriguing information also captures something of the moment, of the passion and wonder of being alive:

          Until this liquor drains

               I’ve a fine wine here. Let’s share it.

          A crane calls in the shade. Its chick answers. 

          Ineffable the ways the Way remains,

          Unspoken, all-enduring, never-ending,

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains.

          And pity the self-hater who abstains,

          Refraining from desire, stiff and un bending.

          Ineffable the ways the Way remains.

          Ingredients of fruits, herbs, berries, grains –

          What inner fire resides in their fine blending.

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains.

          Its tastes – so complex! How the mouth retains

          Echoes of subtle flavours, time suspending.

          Ineffable the way the way remains.

          Threading through tunnelled arteries and veins

          Its fire fans out, ever itself extending.

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains.

          Come, sit outside with me and watch the cranes

          Fly overhead. Heart-warming? Or heart-rending?

          Ineffable the ways the way remains.

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains. 

The repetition and the patterning in the villanelle form makes for a very musical poetry which also allows for nuance and complexity even as the writing is direct and clear. Here you get the feel of intoxication and its relation to human physiology and also the mystery and directness of being alive in the moment. There is resonance and I’m getting Andrew Marvell’s sense of abundance in his ‘garden poems’ as well as other hints that I’m not quite sure about. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and re-reading these poems and I can only repeat that it was good to be re-acquainted with this singular and prolific voice.

Steve Spence 5th February 2023

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Symbiont: 50 Sonnets by Dominic Hand (Veer Books)

Posted on May 25, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Symbiont: 50 Sonnets by Dominic Hand (Veer Books)

The emphasis in the environmental sciences nowadays is less on Darwinian competitiveness than on how organisms interact synergically in complex systems. Meantime old concepts of nature have steadily been eroded, both by posthumanism and the recognition of the Anthropocene. Changes have consequently been due in nature writing, which can often still be structured around the human, personal and agonistic. Since language itself is structured that way – subjects and accusatives, persons and possessives – it’s no easy project, but one which innovative poetries – more willing than the mainstream to radically disrupt conventions – have so far had most success in undertaking.

Dominic Hand’s ecopoetics is particularly inventive and visually dramatic. His sonnets’ full justification, small font, lower case and lack of punctuation mean they appear as striated squares, like something blockily manufactured. The same features make them a dizzying and dense read: each poem a single sentence whose clausal links are participles, prepositions or relative pronouns rather than conjunctions. The formalism evokes the connectedness of each poem’s ecosystem, while I guess the phrasal stacking enacts the complexity of entanglement and permeability within it:

tumbling like motes in an eye’s cold prism
the multi-dimensional non-motile drifts
of diatoms jinking through benthic plasm
constellate fragments of starlight in rifts
as subdued as the night sky’s deep and atlantean
gravities corralling dust clouds to maps
of compassless pyrenoids sequestering carbon
in scattershot nebulas of jet-propelled salps
where larvae of herrings and urchins revolve
in orbit around the ghost nets and nurdles
disjected from dead zones to gloam or dissolve
like space-junk a blank cyclorama encircles
with mass-shifting clusters of radiolarians
secreting  dark  silicas  crushed  down  to  aeons

The poems share a focused present tense and a vocabulary rich in scientific Graecisms, among diverse rhythms and novel part-rhymes (‘lily pad […] helipad’ was among my favourites). Their global metaphor is symbiosis: trees and fungi, oxpeckers and impalas, cleaner fish and eels, with the cognizance that humans are most often a parasitic part of the arrangements. Among much wordplay, the language of finance often infiltrates, a reminder that Donna Haraway and others prefer the term Capitalocene to Anthropocene. Allusions to Marvell, Hopkins, Dickinson and so on ‘versify’, I suppose, the ecological process of succession. Great titles like ‘In a Landskip’ and ‘To a Hyperobject’ made me smile (albeit bitterly). I also learned lots about botany, animal navigation, plankton (see above), fracking, bacteria, factory farming, plastiglomerates, polymers… Whew.

The main emotion I experienced, besides wonder or horror at what’s depicted, was admiration veering to reverence as to its creation. The posthumanist turn with its vanished narrator does risk, ironically enough, restoring deific qualities to writers as, appropriating the internet’s omniscience, they stride across the specialist lexicons of genetics, geology, water engineering and computer networking with their name on the cover still signposting a distinct locus of origin and control. In whatever case this collection hardly needs me as a commensual symbiont; it and its young author have already won several deserved prizes, and the back-page blurbs are from J.H. Prynne and Peter Larkin. But I’ll say it anyway: it’s just fabulous.

Guy Russell 25th May 2022

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The Intaglio Poems by Iain Britton (Hesterglock Press)

Posted on October 7, 2017 by tearsinthefence
The Intaglio Poems by Iain Britton (Hesterglock Press)

None of us can see into another person’s mind and we have to reconcile ourselves to ending at our skin, that elasticated sack within which we live. In Andrew Marvell’s ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ the cry of anguish which opens the poem yearns for rescue from enslavement and, like Shakespeare’s Ariel, it reflects upon the ‘Magick’ that could confine it pining within the body’s physical limitation. However, it is language itself, like a shark’s fin moving through the distance between us that can form the bridge between self and other, between Now and Then.
It is no mere accident that the first of Iain Britton’s opening sequence, ‘The Vignettes’, should embed itself on the first page, fossil-like looking both forwards and outwards, whilst peering inwards to a stone past:

“but these eyes fossilised in glistening rock
embedded in the bone work of a carver’s
imagination / transfix the visitor / the

foreigner / to the jawline / the coastline
of a hill bridging hollowed-out ravines
hanging by threads of luminous particles /

these eyes light up / yet nothing flickers /
no church or tabernacle sings / constantly
they’re turning coded valedictions inwards”

On the back cover of The Intaglio Poems Peter Riley comments upon how the poet deals with the entanglement of the personal human condition and suggests that “Human problems, frequently a question of reconciling self and other, are read in terms of place, landscape, image, the clutter and scenery of civilisation…”. The “visitor”, like the reader of the poem, is transfixed by the stone eye in a manner a little like that of the wedding-guest held by the Ancient Mariner’s “glittering” one. As readers of these poems we cannot choose but hear. Words set their mark on the page as a “solitary window is splashed with the Pacific” (‘weather-vane’), “salt grains liquefy” and “gannets drop suddenly into the surf”. The ten opening vignettes, ornamental borders of trailing tendrils, are followed by eight meditations and then nine poems on the elements earth, fire and water before we arrive at an inner portal, the nine engraved pieces which illustrate the book’s title. There is a painterly aspect to this writing and a clear sense of the picture within the confines or window-frames of the page. As such it takes me back to an earlier piece by Britton which he published in Zone 2 (edited from University of Kent by Kat Peddie and Eleanor Perry). The fourth ‘equation’ in a sequence of six offered the reader a house with a girl, a room with a view:

“she shuts the door

of the house i built

stands at the table

at a vase of flowers on the table

she goes to the window

touches a fallen petal”

The house built of words “locks her in” and the interior takes on the existence of another world as the flowers (“orbitally hung”) “float / and colour-scape the room”. Now, held within the engravings of these new ‘Intaglio Poems’

“visions pack in quickly-taken breaths”

And “this teacher knows every brick / in his house”; he “writes messages / to himself” to alchemically transform place and conjure up “multiple / topographies” all of which spell out his name.
The Intaglio Poems concludes with nine short prose ‘narratives’; an eerie surrealism haunts these pieces and I find the world of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux shimmering before my eyes and “love’s pictured pedestal” found in a ghost story. The poet admits to the accusation of “writing my name in water” and as I look back at the poems which blink their eyes in both directions, to the past and to the future, I cannot help but also recall Charles Tomlinson’s geometry of water in ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’:

“For to swim is also to take hold
On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace
And to be, between grasp and grasping, free.”

The Intaglio Poems by Iain Britton is an intriguing volume concerned with the ephemeral nature of things, as Nikolai Duffy writes. It is “carved out of a language aware of its own fragility” and images “cycle and recycle like tidal echoes”.

Ian Brinton, 7th October 2017

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