RSS Feed

Tag Archives: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Not Here – There by Andrew Taylor (Shearsman Books)

Posted on October 28, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Not Here – There by Andrew Taylor (Shearsman Books)

The poems in Not There – Here are somewhat more relaxed and conversational in tone than Taylor’s earlier books, but are still in the vein of minimalist, compressed writing typical of his work, in which close observation of the external world is mixed with a collage of texts and discourses. For this short review I want to focus on a single poem which I think is representative of many of the poems in the book. Here’s the poem in full:

Larch

The larch has been felled

                                         Phytophthera ramorum

let’s drive the different route 17 miles

cattle grids

                    empty feedbags

                    strung like scarecrows

Railway at times runs parallel

ballast plumb line straight

Our single track

                                      Passing place

Signal stagnant

            inactivity

signpost navigation GPS

                    unnamed road

follow the quietness

valley empty      it looks like a bomb’s gone off

toward the estate there is cover

thirty five years ago

we took this drive       tracks remain

for supplies

milk bread

tea

the forest is weak it is halved

      the lochs become visible

their tracks evident

above the grey house

commands

The poem opens with a blunt statement which recalls other poets mourning felled trees; Hopkins ‘airy aspens’ or John Clare’s ‘Fallen Elm in a metonymic manner typical of this collection. The Latin name which follows (in a characteristically abrupt switch) brings us back to language and reminds us of how it affects our perception: the Latin name conjures up a very different image to the Anglo-Saxon ‘Larch’. We are then given a description of a drive (is it on Route 17, or a route of 17 miles?) in what seems to be a rural area of single-track roads. The phrase “follow the quietness / valley empty” is followed by the jarring phrase “it looks like a bomb’s gone off” which recalls bomb sites in post-war British cities and is immediately followed by “toward the estate there is cover”. Is this a country estate of a big landowner, or a housing estate associated with deprived communities? It appears to be the former, but a suggestion of the latter is there, and it’s this ambiguity, this leaving lines open to interpretation, which gives the poem a feeling of large scope and of horizons beyond the specific details that it focusses on. After this moment of uncertainty, we are back on the rural drive, slightly altered after its collision with the urban, in which “the forest is weak it is halved” and where the word “loch” situates us for the first time in a precise landscape, that of highland Scotland. The final lines are:

above the grey house

commands

The verb ‘commands’ is left without an object; does it command a view? Or is the house that of a landowner who commands the surrounding land and its people, invoking the British class system and thus linking the rural Scottish landscape to the deprived communities hinted at earlier? Either way, the ending of the poem is open, leaving interpretation to the reader rather than to a commanding poet-persona; this openness and lightness of touch being a feature of the poems throughout this collection.

The poems in this book, like the one above, have individual moments of stillness which shift rapidly to a different perspective, sometimes (but not always) because the text is a collage. This makes reading even a short, apparently imagistic poem, into a disorienting experience. In a sense these poems are cubist, presenting multiple perspectives of a scene or an event without privileging any single one. The poems deny a single, omniscient self. It’s a natural human tendency to impose a narrative on experience, and these poems seem to be trying to strip that away and present experience as it is. This would be in line with Taylor’s influences in the music of John Cage or the notebook poems of Jack Kerouac, both of whom, espousing Zen thought with its denial of single controlling Self, preferred to be open to an unbounded connection with the world.

Alan Baker 28th October 2021

1 Comment

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

Seven Leaf Sermons by Peter Larkin artwork by Rupert Loydell (Guillemot Press)

Posted on August 19, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Seven Leaf Sermons by Peter Larkin artwork by Rupert Loydell (Guillemot Press)

In Part I of A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality, the title of which suggests the connection between being and movement, the philosopher asserts that the number one ‘stands for the singularity of an entity’ and that the term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one’. A quarter of a century later Charles Olson was to write to Robert Creeley that the term ‘One makes Many’ had been overheard by him as being uttered by Cornelia Williams, the cook in Black Mountain College and the phrase was then adopted by Olson as an epigraph for The Maximus Poems. On similar lines Olson wrote an autobiographical note in November 1952 stating

‘that there is no such thing as duality either of the body and the soul or of the world and I, that the fact of the human universe is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one…’

In the opening stanza of the sixth of Peter Larkin’s intensely focused poems we can recognise this inseparable connection between the one and the many as ‘a bough is poised between heaven / and earth, full in leaf points to its latent interceding.’ The moving outwards of ‘points’ leads on to the later thought in the same poem:

‘,,.The tree would have no firmament without its
cloud of leaves’

In its Hebraic origins the word ‘firmament’ may well suggest ‘expanse’ as in the treading out of metals, the beating out, the making firm of a primal source. All journeys have sources and the ‘many’ is an outspreading of the ‘one’; in terms of travel, however, there is always loss as well as gain and the opening poem contemplates this inevitable relationship:

‘…The tree was soon parted
from its leaves, but not its wintering seed: what’s this
casts off any distress of tree, simply wrinkles in leaf?’

Like leaves from a tree words have an outward yearning towards different meaning and ‘leaves’ contains an echo of parting just as the word ‘wrinkles’ hints at the Thomas Nashe lines from ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament’:

‘Beauty is but a flower,
Which wrinkles will devour,
Brightness falls from the air’

In his ‘Journal’ dated 17th October 1873 Gerard Manley Hopkins noted the unending connection between tree and leaf, the one and the many, as the end of the month brought severe frosts:

‘Wonderful downpour of leaf: when the morning sun began to melt the frost they fell at one touch and in a few minutes a whole tree was flung of them; they lay masking and papering the ground at the foot. Then the tree seems to be looking down on its cast self as blue sky on snow after a long fall, its losing, its doing.’

Contemplating movement which is loss Peter Larkin uses language in his Seven Leaf Sermons which breathes an echo of the early seventeenth century:

‘Lacking leaf a tree is not unhoused, but homeless enough
a leaf at last turns its page. It became apron
only to the underclothing of indigent tree, litter for free.
Saw-leaves, no longer interior scapes of trunk passed across
branch-scape, but sole sly ratchet in gear above tree’

The homelessness of ‘unhoused’ brings before us the King Lear whose address to the Fool signals the opening of a moment of meditative prayer the rhetoric of which would be at home in an early dissenting sermon. He exclaims ‘You houseless poverty’ before falling to his knees and addressing the world peopled with ‘houseless heads’ and ‘unfed sides’.
Peter Larkin’s ‘Sermon 3’ presents us with a leaf that ‘breathes in rain but drinks from the root’ and the etymology of words, the foundation of language, is the precursor of expression: the one leading to the many. ‘The sound of rain is its light rattle’ itself offers a continuation from Larkin’s publication from last year, Trees Before Abstinent Ground (Shearsman Books, 2019) in which

‘an out-where of
woods feathered at
joint, a fledgling
withinness with
which they flaunt

articulatio’

‘Rooted from edge’ (‘exposure (A Tree) presents’, 2011 and published by Shearsman Books in 2014 under the title Give Forest Its Next Portent) had already suggested an indissoluble link between the moment of setting out and the landscape arrived at within the act of journeying and ‘Sermon 3’ offers us

‘The rain-swirl is what leaves didn’t filter, they fold
around one main curl further down, how root-scope gets
to think (sank) the shape of its drink trunk-spiralled.’

This is a beautifully produced book from Guillemot Press and the illustrations provided by Rupert Loydell add to the contemplative sense of presentation matching content; Olson would have been rather pleased with that too!

Ian Brinton, 19th August 2020

1 Comment

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

Kalimba by Petero Kalulé (Guillemot Press)

Posted on April 3, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Kalimba by Petero Kalulé (Guillemot Press)

A kalimba is an African instrument consisting of a wooden box and fingerlike metal tines which are plucked by thumbs, and an acoustic hole, which can also be used to make a sound, by hovering one’s thumbs over the hole. Watching it being played, I was struck by the handiness of the instrument, held in two hands like a mobile phone, the tines plucked as though the player is sending a text message.
It is easy to see the appeal of this instrument to a poet, particularly a poet deeply interested in music, like Petero Kalulé. The collection’s dedication reads ‘for all my friends: that these notations may vibrate close in y/our hands’. The physical book is shaped like a kalimba, and the cover is designed as one. The conceit is that, as we read Kalulé’s poetry, aloud or in our heads, we are playing an instrument. Whether Kalulé wants us to play his music or use his poems like notes with which to make our own music, is unclear. The difference is that either the poetry book is a music book, with pieces with notes to be read and obeyed, or it is like the instrument itself, simply to be played with.

As the instrument conceit suggests, Kalulé’s principal focus in his poems is sound. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kalulé’s poems indulge in the rich sounds that words strung together make, alongside directions of dashed and parentheses which are not unlike musical notations. Words are split and divided, by line breaks or using letters which, when spoken, sound like a syllable. This excerpt is from ‘Sahara’:

sun, ocean, islets cowries, manatee, manity, scope, memory, glee
vision s, minarets, spires
language, b
-orders, planets, poems, music, spells, serpents, shells, piss,
Blood
[….]
It un does tXture

The typography, like the verses, is a law unto its own. One word becomes another; Kalulé draws out surprising links between words, either semantically related or seemingly unrelated, purely by the way they sound. Words are manipulated in this way such that the poems, more like music than poetry, are sequences of sound with a tone and a mood, but no other direction.

In a certain mood a reader can allow the sounds and words to roll over their tongue and mind in a pleasing way, meaning almost whatever one wants it to mean.

Kalulé’s aesthetic, his structure-breaking structure, feels rigid by virtue of its forcefulness. A word can mean a myriad of things, but strangely, Kalulé’s attempts to push and pull words, to familiarize and then defamiliarize, rather seems to be an attempt to imprison or pin down words. For example, the word ‘borders’ is almost forced into meaning borders as in the border of a country, by the very fact it is forcibly divided, and the word ‘order’ within the word, is attenuated. Almost only, because it is of course impossible to force words to do anything. It is like Kalulé wants his words to have more than one meaning, but no more than the three he is thinking of. His unconventional, aesthetic approach to the practice of poeticizing, rather than being liberating, felt like a harness. Words in chains, and their chains were these erratic, driven, structures. This quotation from Cecil Taylor is included as foreword to the collection: “Part of what this music is about is not to be delineated exactly. It’s about magic, & capturing spirits.” There is tension here, in the freedom of escape from restrictive ‘delineating’, and the desire for ‘capturing’. Experimental structures and manipulation of lyric traditions, by calling attention to the way they can be formed, seem to do exactly this: delineate. These structures, to me, felt less playful than paranoid.

I enjoyed the rush of sound which Kalulé releases into the world, delicious and intriguing, signs and significations that rear their heads like fish between the waves before vanishing or transfiguring. Nevertheless, after reading these poems, I was left with the resounding sound of the futility and frustration of a poet, who finds his words less like an instrument to be played and more like a horse to be reined in. Whether by accident or on purpose, Kalulé’s musical conceit impressed on me the realisation that words are not like musical notes. They are neither consistent in their sound, nor played and silenced by the touch, or untouch, of a thumb.

Yvette Dell 3rd April 2020

1 Comment

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

Matrix I & Matrix II by David Miller (Guillemot Press)

Posted on January 1, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Matrix I & Matrix II by David Miller (Guillemot Press)

‘the green edge of yesterday’

In 1958 William Carlos Williams wrote his ‘autobiography of the works of a poet’ in conversation with Edith Heal. The title of the book was unflinchingly clear: I Wanted to Write a Poem. In the early pages Williams talked about the writing of his 1920 publication Kora in Hell: Improvisations and gave an account of its inception:

“For a year I used to come home and no matter how late it was before I went to bed I would write something. And I kept writing, writing, even if it were only a few words, and at the end of the year there were 365 entries. Even if I had nothing in my mind at all I put something down…They were a reflection of the day’s happenings more or less, and what I had had to do with them.”

Realising that he would need to “interpret” these thoughts Williams found a book that Ezra Pound had left in his house, Varie Poesie dell’ Abate Pietro Metastasio, Venice, 1795 and he took the method used by the Abbot of drawing a line between his improvisations (“those more or less incomprehensible statements”) and his interpretations of them. Williams chose the frontispiece to his volume from a drawing done by a young artist from Gloucester, Stuart Davis: “It was, graphically, exactly what I was trying to do in words, put the Improvisations down as a unit on the page. You must remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way. Anyhow, Floss and I went to Gloucester and got permission from Stuart Davis to use his art – an impressionistic view of the simultaneous.” And it is that impressionistic view of what happens in the present that seems to haunt David Miller’s deeply moving new volumes, heralding in a new year, a New decade: moments of memory appearing sharply in focus before the merging together of movements. An “arcade in memory or dream” precedes the “pianist forced to dig hard earth with his fingers” but one who “played no more”.
Threading its path through the twenty lyrical pieces of Matrix I there is “calligraphy entwined with drawing” as “my words entwined her art”. Personal recollections are given the exactness of place and Miller’s musical rhythms sound drawn by the “ink & Chinese brushes / bought in a Chinese supermarket // in Gerrard Street / c. 1973”. Descending “the chines / in darkness // & in wind” the poet remembers “how I phoned you one evening / in despair” and the quietness of personal recollection borrows movement from a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ in which the ending of the first section (“Despair, despair, despair, despair”) is followed by the echo which is golden:

“Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!),
Only not within seeing of the sun.
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Ońe.”

Miller’s movement is from “despair” to an impressionistic reconstruction which merges the domestic and the ubiquitous:

“30 years later we met again
& soon after we married

so many wasted years
amongst fickle & false friends

along with the few
who truly counted

– in dream
a tiny being sylph-like

wings useless
clogged with mud

stranded in a gutter
crying for help”

In late Latin the word ‘matrix’ refers to the womb: that dark place in which new growth commences and, as we stand upon the bones of the past, we can glimpse both who and where we are. It is with this movement forward that Matrix II opens with “a bent tree by / the water’s edge” and “now in Dorset // an old farmhouse / & converted outbuilding”.

David Miller’s impressionistic world of sight and sound, of memory and desire, is an unforgettable realisation of the movement of age:

“heavy rain
all night

nonsequences
no

but going back
& forth

I slept little that night
dreaming of friends…dead

who had no desire
to protest or complain

nor to stay

These two lyrical sequences are a moving tribute to a poet’s awareness of the past. Like the fifth ‘Improvisation’ from Williams’s Kora there is a “beautiful white corpse of night” and voices are “restfully babbling of how, where, why and night is done and the green edge of yesterday has said all it could.”

Ian Brinton, January 1st 2020

1 Comment

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

Embodiment by Dinah Livingstone (Katabasis Press)

Posted on September 2, 2019 by tearsinthefence
Embodiment by Dinah Livingstone (Katabasis Press)

Embodiment is a less scary word than incarnation but its choice as title of Dinah Livingstone’s tenth collection reflects her loyalty to Christian theology as a central metaphor. This consistency also allows her to lay claim to a continuous selfhood:

I knew that I was me when I was five,
I’m grown up now and not a little girl
but still myself, though I don’t look the same. ‘Keeping Faith’

The continuity is upheld despite physical changes in the body she speaks from. Livingstone maintains that the poetic voice is always embodied which is why so many of these poems are written in her own voice and explore her own experience. About three fifths of the poems use the first person where this can be identified with the poet. It is not egotistical self-indulgence that motivates her writing, but the belief that physical life on earth is a common or shared experience and that if the poet writes accurately and honestly in their own embodied voice the words will communicate and recognised by others. The first half of the collection uses not only the voice of the poet but includes and acknowledges the voices of others:

Any voice, whether
of someone dear, or hated
like an obnoxious politician,
though each speaks the language
of its social niche, its daily connections,
has its unique print. ‘Loved Voices’

Sometimes, she simply describes the other voice, be it neighbour, teacher, grandson or even the poet, Stevie Smith. In other cases, she takes different personas, as in the delightful sonnet shared between a boy and a fox. In ‘The Yearning Strong’, an eco-protest, she invents a voice from the future which uses the perspective of distance to record some of her own most cherished experiences: ‘There’s a huge animal you can ride on,/stroke its furry neck and trot/through the wood or gallop over the moor.’ In another very powerful poem, she reports the voices of drowning migrants in English and through some of their own languages. This poem records a failure of communication in one of the few moments where the overall tone of positivity falters:

‘Who listens?
Something is very wrong.
What can we do?

Perhaps the implicit message is the importance of listening and hearing, without which there can be no action.

In the second part of the collection, ‘Embodiment’, the voice is the same and themes are developed from the first section which are familiar from the writer’s other work. The first poem, which relates to the cover reproduction from Blake’s illustrations of Paradise Lost, serves as a manifesto. For Livingstone, as for Blake and Stevie Smith in the first section, gods are human inventions and their stories are metaphors or projections of what humans want:

the full embodiment of Christ will be
an actual reign of kindness long imagined,
which now – with nothing supernatural –
ordinary people try (or not)
by love and work to give something towards. ‘Alpha and Omega’

The confident ‘will’ in the first line of this quotation is slightly undermined by the bracketed ‘or not’ in the penultimate, perhaps reinforcing the recognition that it is up to humans what they make of the world.

In the sequence Keeping Faith, Livingstone brings together two of her concerns, the nature of the self and the embodiment of ‘faith and hope and love’ in a world where ‘kindness’ in its fullest sense prevails. I think this is because the fullest embodiment comes through self-realization, as in ‘November’ where she describes a plane tree: “Self-possessed, this London plane/spreads high into the blue’ , a notion of self-hood clearly derived from Hopkins. To oversimplify, the best community will be reached through ‘all those different selves’ achieving their full potential or selfhood. Sometimes it seems that ‘embodiment’ is purely physical; sometimes, it seems to include works of art, such as a poem.

Or you write what you didn’t expect
and it is beyond prose –a poem.
And when, at last, your living child is born,
you see his face and the midwife
gives you him to hold,
himself and snuffling in your arms. ‘Nature and Grace’

However, the age-old divide between body and spirit is challenged in ‘Prologue’, an introductory sonnet to the sequence Embodiment: ‘How could a disembodied spirit speak/or dance or sing the paradox, the power,/the passion and the truth of human hearts?’ We may note the verbs, ‘speak’, ‘dance’ and ‘sing’ are all rooted in the body, and presented as the only way in which the abstractions of ‘power’, ‘passion’ and ‘truth’ can be expressed, i.e., physically.

Among other things, this book confronts the process of aging with grace. Although it could be described as mellower than some of her other work, this is a collection in which Livingstone continues to observe, celebrate and strive.

Kathleen McPhilemy 2nd September 2019

Leave a comment

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

The Country Gambler by Erica McAlpine (Shearsman Books)

Posted on April 22, 2016 by tearsinthefence
The Country Gambler by Erica McAlpine (Shearsman Books)

The distrust that William Carlos Williams had of the poetry of T.S. Eliot is well known and for confirmation one could certainly turn up that letter Williams sent to James Laughlin in March 1939 in which he damned the American ex-pat with the faint praise of being ‘a cultured gentleman’ before going on to add ‘and cultured gentlemen are always likely to undersell the market’:

‘I’m glad you like his verse but I’m warning you, the only reason it doesn’t smell is that it’s synthetic…He can write. Granted. But—it’s like walking into a church to me. I can’t do it without a bad feeling at the pit of my stomach: nothing has been learned there since the simplicities were prevented from becoming multiform by arrest of growth…’

But we had been made aware of Williams’ distrust long before. In fact from Spring and All onwards! A couple of pages before ‘By the road to the contagious hospital’ there is the prose note ‘If I could say what is in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity…’. Maybe it’s that word ‘integrity’ that prompts me think of both Williams and Gerard Manley Hopkins when I read the introductory poem to this fine first collection put out by Shearsman: ‘Sempervivum’.

‘Long-living plant, that flowers on the ground and
spawns in circles round itself, whose low and quiet
center stores a gravity not surpassed by
stone, down to the pith,’

As the stones from a sonnet by Hopkins ‘ring’ and the ‘weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush’ in ‘Spring’ so do the houseleeks of Erica McAlpine ‘put forth into these leaves’ a sense of energy that feeds on ‘both drought and faith’. The resurgence of life that Williams captures in that roadside to the contagious hospital can be felt throughout this sensitive and uplifting volume of poems. Both poet and reader are immersed within this energy and we can recognise that ‘it’s in our power / to spend the whole afternoon drinking our fill / of sun (soaking now through the canvas over /us)’ confirming us in the feeling that ‘These are the Happiest Days’.
When George Oppen referred to the ‘isolation of the actual’ in Of Being Numerous he was thinking of rooms and ‘what they look out on’ and basements, ‘the rough walls bearing the marks of the forms, the old marks in the concrete, such solitude as we know’. McAlpine reminds us that ‘life is brief’ and therefore brings sharply into focus the immediacy of what is involved in being ‘The Country Gambler’:

‘You’ll find me in the clover patch from August
to October, detangling tangled stem from stem,
inspecting each one over, knowing three
seems four when two stems meet and send a leaf
from under, or if they cross along the neck then
six can be the number. And some are tall,
and bent with rain, and overtop the grass,
while others, tiny, clump their leaves in bunches
thick as moss.’

If there is a tone of Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall here there is also that of John Clare whose ‘Clock a Clay’ (ladybird) makes its home in a ‘pale green pillar topt wi’flowers’ which bends at the wild wind’s breath ‘Till I touch the grass beneath’. In the hunt for a four-leaved clover ‘shade can turn the leafage blond’ and wind ‘can push the petal-ends to ground’, making them ‘hard to sort’. With another sly glance at an English poet there is perhaps here a tone of Edward Thomas’s searching for the seemingly long-lost possibility of Eden and Erica McAlpine agrees with Thomas that ‘I wouldn’t cut the searching short’. After all, ‘Nothing’s better than the luck you find’.

I have merely scratched at the surface of these poems and I firmly recommend that you order a copy now; they represent a significant beginning of a serious poetic talent.

Ian Brinton 22nd April 2016

Leave a comment

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

Give Forest Its Next Portent by Peter Larkin

Posted on October 23, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Give Forest Its Next Portent by Peter Larkin

Shearsman Books

In Robert Browning’s poem from the 1864 sequence Dramatis Personae, ‘Gold Hair’, the poet refers to the ‘beautiful girl…/ Who lived at Pornic, down by the sea’:

‘Yet earth saw one thing, one how fair!
One grace that grew to its full on earth:
Smiles might be sparse on her cheek so spare,
And her waist want half a girdle’s girth,
But she had her great gold hair.’

The word ‘sparse’ is derived from the Latin verb spargere, to scatter, and can refer to being widely spaced or spread out as well as distributed in all directions. In the section from this new book from Peter Larkin, ‘Sparse reach Stretches the Field’ (2011) the word is used on some twelve occasions and refers to an outward thrust of growth ‘stretched at drawn-out fully sparse’. In the earlier section of this lovely collection of writing, ‘exposure (A Tree) presents’, following on from an epigraphic quotation from Roger Langley (‘The Tree. It shows what we would call / constraint. It bursts through rock in calluses’) we are given a piece of prose which is unmistakably Peter Larkin:

Already unsealed from itself but poor enough to steal attached life to a kit of relation, a blunt jerk towards additions of acceptance, copiously sparse, rooted from edge.’

The words push outwards, unsealing, becoming movements which steal in stealth with an unstoppable ‘blunt jerk’: they are rooted from edge, prayer-like upwards and stretching towards what lies beyond the page.

‘Prayer takes the flightpath of a world not yet cleared of trees but they already betoken its etiolation the by-tallness of placing ascent to
obtrude through seems already stretching past the flattened way firs obsess a periphery beyond what is their focal legion, patrolling a prayer
at its slender successors of margin’

(Section III of ‘praying // firs // attenuate’, 2014)

When I wrote a short review three years ago of Harriet Tarlo’s anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, The Ground Aslant, I referred to Peter Larkin’s work in comparison with the prose poems of Francis Ponge and suggested that the French writer’s eye had been attracted to contrasts, edges, contours, meeting places: those areas which define where one thing ends and another begins. Ponge’s interest in edges, boundaries, ‘bords de mer’, dispelled the vertigo of gazing at the overwhelming bulk of phenomena: the grand ocean of Victor Hugo’s language is dispelled by a focus on the particular and seashores offer a framework akin to the pages of a published piece of writing. Or as Charles Tomlinson put it in a poem composed in December 1952, ‘REALITY is to be sought, not in concrete, / But in space made articulate: / The shore, for instance, / Spreading between wall and wall; / The sea-voice / Tearing the silence from the silence.’

The taut and straining movement of Peter Larkin’s work inevitably brings to mind the complexity of language used by Gerard Manley Hopkins and I looked up the 1873 ‘Journal’ to find

‘At the end of the month hard frosts. Wonderful downpour of leaf: when the morning sun began to melt the frost they fell at one touch and in a few minutes a whole tree was flung of them; they lay masking and papering the ground at the foot. Then the tree seems to be looking down on its cast self as blue sky on snow after a long fall, its losing, its doing’

As Larkin suggests

‘Nothing squats in the midst of guileless void unless hollows a layer of intricate tackle out of the way of itself cunning of branch at a longitude of members if this is to allow itself at last there will be fewer withheld packets countering as sheer twist the vertical risk of thickets’

Note please the absence of a full-stop at the end of either of these quotations. Life continues to push outwards and ‘sparse’ will lead to ‘great gold hair’.

Ian Brinton, 23rd October 2014

Leave a comment

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

Missel-Child by Helen Tookey

Posted on January 27, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Missel-Child by Helen Tookey

Missel-Child by Helen Tookey

Carcanet, £9.95

 

One of the links connecting the prose poems of Francis Ponge and the early poetry of Charles Tomlinson is a concern for boundaries, edges, limits that define what is just visible before the limit is decided. Tomlinson called it ‘space made articulate’:

 

The shore between wall and wall;

The sea-voice

Tearing the silence from the silence.

 

Ponge wrote about steering to the edges of things so that we can recognise them. Helen Tookey’s first full-length volume of poems also brings into focus a clear vision of where one world meets another. Whether it be in the epigraph quotation from Sir Hugh Plat’s Herbarium of 1653, aptly called The Garden of Eden, or in the emergence of a lost world at Formby Point, these remarkably haunting poems give us a vision of ‘what’s lost’ being ‘everywhere’. The flatlands at Burscough and the flat lines on a page offer ‘black coffers’ which ‘lie rich with the drowned.’ I used the word haunting about these poems because time and again I am struck by a past which, palimpsest as it appears, has a vivid tangibility that can be uncovered: footprints which have become lithographic over time, uncovered, become alive with the validity of their presence:

 

four-toes, twisted, no use

at the hunt; this girl, months-heavy, inching

her way, clawed feet curled hard into the mud;

and the children, quick, unhurried, knowing

themselves alone possessed of a future.

 

These children suggest kinship with those whose hidden and excited quickness of laughter were connected to ‘Time past and time future’ in ‘Burnt Norton’.

Just as the tide uncovers the relics left by ocean the narrator of ‘Cockleshells’ contemplates the margin between presence and absence:

 

I carry

merely yesterday’s meanings but

 

you are already translated, turning

towards the bright months while I

 

collect October’s cockleshells,

curetted cleanly by the sea.

 

One of the most intriguing and compelling poems in this book is ‘Hollow Meadows’ which opens with a quotation from the early notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins in which he gives some definitions of ‘Hollow’ relating the word to ‘hull (of ships and plants)’ and then skulls/heads which are both hollow and ‘hold’. Hopkins ends by suggesting the shape of Hell. Tookey’s poem guides us through a range of memories and extracts circling around these definitions of hollowness before concluding with one of those boundary moments where one world intrudes momentarily and eerily upon another. Hopkins was well aware of Hell and in his 1883 ‘Meditation’ on the subject he wrote ‘And as it is by the imagination that we are to realize these things so I suppose it to be by the imagination that the lost suffer them and that as intensely as by the senses or it may be more so.’

Helen Tookey’s imaginative realization of worlds just beyond the visible horizons is both striking and deeply enchanting: take care!

 

Ian Brinton 27th January 2014. 

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
%d bloggers like this: