As Nancy Gaffield’s new chapbook of poems tells us ‘each poem is an exploration / of language in place’. The phrase is followed by a reference to Gaston Bachelard’s influential 1958 volume The Poetics of Space in which he asserted that ‘Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.’ Early on in the book Bachelard quotes from Rilke:
‘House, patch of meadow, oh evening light
Suddenly you acquire an almost human face
You are very near us, embracing and embraced.’
And when I looked at this it was with a leap of recognition that I thought of Robert Duncan’s opening lines to ‘Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’:
‘as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein…’
Combining the Fibonacci accumulation of numbers seen as space on the page, alongside a floor-plan of what appears as a horizontal cathedral, Nancy Gaffield offers the reader an Olsonian journey and provides us with a ‘presence of place to / share words and deeds’. As she says, ‘this is polis’.
Bachelard asserts that a house constitutes a body of images ‘that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’ and goes on to suggest that, as a building, a house is imagined as ‘a vertical being’ which rises upwards differentiating itself in terms of its verticality. Nancy Gaffield’s poems are constructions which link our presence to our past:
‘Like
poems
ammonites
build their shells around
principles of geometry
the fossil in this stone lived seventy million years
ago by turning in on itself this is slow life in a fortress town
that passes
its days dreaming from within its walls until the last
catastrophe petrifies them
in their stone coffins
a far cry
from the
sea’
Like a mathematical accretion from the thirteenth century the poem builds up before reaching the turning point of ‘passes’ prompting the lines to withdraw to the stone coffin of the printed page and its resonant echo that sounds so far from its original source. These poems are not merely skilful; they possess a haunting beauty that allows history to breathe. The advantage Herodotus has over Thucydides, according to Olson, is that the father of History says the voice is greater than the eye:
‘If you shout—if you tell your story—he listens to you. He doesn’t give you that nod and finger which destroys you, wagging, and saying, look, you ain’t there. He says, you say so? OK, I believe you. Truth is what is said, not what is seen. Your own report is good enough for him. You say you lived here? OK. You did. These things happened to you? OK. Sign here’
These new poems may concentrate upon what can be seen, sight, but their echo is what lasts with me, an ‘undercroft’, a ghost that lives in language, a fluid movement into which I can dive in order to experience the vertigo of the matter-of-fact ‘colliding with memory’. They are built to last!
Ian Brinton February 21st 2015
Tears in the Fence 