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England on Fire by Stephen Ellcock and Mat Osman (Watkins Press)

Posted on May 21, 2022 by tearsinthefence
England on Fire by Stephen Ellcock and Mat Osman (Watkins Press)

Which writer is not at some level engaged with place, landscape, mythology, folklore and stories? It may be overt, it may be in opposition to established histories or geographies, it may be about colonisation, rebellion or immigration, it may be about revisiting the past and present through the lens of gender, sexuality or identity, it might simply creep into our writing because we all live somewhere and hear and see things others don’t.

England on Fire is subtitled A Visual Journey Through Albion’s Psychic Landscape, the kind of phrase that smacks of vague New Age mysticism and woolly religious philosophies. It doesn’t do itself many favours by this kind of labelling, because the book – an anthology of carefully curated images accompanied by Mat Osman’s poetic prose – is much harder-edged and interesting than that subtitle and dour cover with a deer-headed figure against a circle of light suggests.

Stephen Ellcock talks about research, intuition, pattern making and collage in the brief authors’ biographies at the start of the book, all creative processes I can relate to. The book is in 12 themed chapters or sections, each evocatively titled (‘Out of Darkness’, ‘Weeds & Wildness’, ‘Rebellious Nature’, ‘Acardia’), each a cluster of beautifully reproduced painting, photos, prints, sculptures or drawings, each opening with a few hundred words from Osman, who responds to Ellcock’s themes through tangent, metaphor and storytelling.

Osman also supplies a more straightforward, if slightly polemical, ‘Introduction’, where he explains how ‘Stephen juxtaposes and weaves imagery around itself, teasing out narratives and finding wild connections in a kind of visual language’, suggesting that the project is politicised, ‘a very English rebellion of the nameless many against the privileged few’, and uses ‘a language that speaks to England’s subconscious’. Heady stuff! But fair enough, although Osman seems to find the images in here more unknown and obscure than I do.

Anyway, what do we get? To start with there is George Frederick Watts’ swirl of creation, swiftly followed by John Martin’s apocryphal ‘The Deluge’, William Blake, Arthur Rackham, Ken Kiff, Samuel Palmer, an Anglo-Saxon brooch, a photographic stereograph of ‘The Devil’s Chimney’, Norman Palmer and one of Madge Gill’s channeled spirit works on paper. This wonderful visual cornucopia is repeated throughout the book, with still from Derek Jarman’s Avebury film, fairy photographs, Notting Hill carnival images, Richard Dadd’s asylum paintings, landscape photography, mazes, the changing face of ‘Settlements’, until we get to the final section ‘Visions’. Here, Osman becomes ecstatic:

   ENGLAND IS A FIREWORKS DISPLAY
   THAT SETS THE NIGHT ABLAZE

   […]

   And us? We are flame-lit and bonfire
   -warmed. We walk in beauty like the night,
   secure in the knowledge that everything
   grows better after a wildfire […]

   England is a firework that burns forever.

Shooting stars, ‘thought forms’ erupting from a cathedral tower, abstract psychedelic inkjet prints, John Martin again, sunsets by George Shaw and Francis Danby… and then Blake’s ‘Jerusalem, The Emanation Of The Giant Albion’ and Dan Hillier’s ‘Older Light’, a heavenly figure radiating light into the darkness.

Elsewhere, scarecrows, the green man, corn figures, bonfires, dragons, druids, the Padstow Obby Oss, witches, mummers, along with Punch & Judy appear; as do ruined buildings, masks, stained glass and documentary photos from Rock Against Racism. This is Albion, an imaginary and hyper-real version of England, in all its glory. A land where races mingle and co-habit, magic and religion co-exist, as do ritual and science, poetry and song, humans, ghosts and imaginary creatures. I wish it said Britain, not England (maybe that’s just me being PC – England seems so non-inclusive) but this new book is inspirational and thought provoking, part documentary, part challenge, part of the ongoing change we are living through: ‘England is an immigrant song that changes us with every singing.’

Rupert Loydell 21st May 2022


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Weep Hole by Mai Ivfjäll (Sad Press)

Posted on July 12, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Weep Hole by Mai Ivfjäll (Sad Press)

Mai Ivfjäll’s poetry shares the quality of symbolic elusiveness with that of William Blake whose motifs are significant in Weep Hole. Tantalising hints throughout the pamphlet invite the reader to explore a world of mysticism and ancient magic as well as the retro future of a fifth element and a divine language.

‘Suspended Not Suspended’ is written from the perspective of Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’ where the secret, invisible worm is its own self-destructive love. Time, in Mai Ivfjäll’s poem, unravels self like the thread of a hem. Here there is ‘no health’ but ‘only living     my sick sick rose’. There are sonnets in Weep Hole, part of a sequence called ‘Sick Sonnets’ which the author has described in an interview with Paul Cunningham of Action Books, as a ‘kind of love letter to the obliteration of self (and attunement to the present moment) that happens in the throes of chronic sickness.’

Sickness, certainly, and pain ‘is a psalm that sings your body is a bivouac’. (‘Glossolalia’). The poems begin with the line ‘the bees are dying – can you feel it?’ and the end of the collection is insistent: ‘the bees are dying the bees are dying’. The book itself is titled Weep Hole – an opening at the bottom of a structure which allows water to drain away. A small opening, a small weeping where ‘healing is an endless emptying’. (Poembody).  In the same poem the author poses the question ‘who wrote the list of the saddest words in the English language/on dictionary.com?’

But it is these words, this focus on the joy of language that most interests me in Weep Hole. In the same interview mentioned earlier Mai Ivfjäll describes how her sonnets may look traditional but inside are a mess ‘gorging on language’. Her poems overflow with sonic richness. ‘I liked the way the sounds tasted in my mouth,’ she says, ‘and wanted others to experience that pleasure.’ 

‘Make Me An Instrument’ offers fine examples of this gorging. One line plays with the sound of words: ‘I am lamb bait a baited lamb a lamented/bam’ while this word chain is perfect in its assonance: ‘noon moon moan koan loan lean/ mean meal meat met wet/let lit i’. What could be a better example of the joy to be found in linguistics than ‘Keening’?

            slime gifs

            are prayer psalms of goo

                                           asmr

            devotional gulp   oozing

holiness        as collapse

The first poem in the book is titled ‘Glossolalia’ and this intriguing word seems to me to be a central motif with its definitions that suggest fluid echoes of speech-like syllables that lack any readily understandable meaning, sounds that predate and supersede human speech, a sense of something transcendent and pentecostal, a language that is divine and mystical. References to books and films enhance ancient mysteries – the narrator slips ‘in and out of time’, one moment as Billy Pilgrim from Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war sci-fi book ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, the next as Leelo from Luc Besson’s ‘The Fifth Element’ – Leelo who by ‘googling a new vocabulary’ and by injecting herself with the quintessence of ether becomes the element itself that alone can defeat a cosmic evil force, can save the planet Earth.

Are we ‘empty vessels or/cosmic bodies’ asks Mai Ivfjäll in ‘S(ub)lime’.In ‘Everywhere Disappeared’ she gives herself a possible answer, disclosing ‘strange fruit    of a strange fire/my secret alphabet’. In ‘Preliminary (Im)materials’ she may ‘caw and claw/and coo I am dead’ but then, in the remarkable poem ‘A Slow Rapture’ she gives us this:

            wet

            magnolia trees

            drip

            memory    haunted

            after-rain baptismal’.

Mandy Pannett 12th July 2021

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We Were Not There by Jordi Doce Translated by Lawrence Schimel (Shearsman Books)

Posted on July 18, 2020 by tearsinthefence
We Were Not There by Jordi Doce Translated by Lawrence Schimel (Shearsman Books)

When Jordi Doce considered the poems of Charles Tomlinson for an Agenda International Issue some twenty-five years ago he noted the voice behind the poems as being ‘wholly unique in its ambition’ before going on to say that the English poet’s ambition and ability was ‘to match and express preoccupations which have remained largely consistent through the years, always expanding and expounding themselves through the workings of an alert, intelligent mind.’ Let me be bold enough to say that similar words may be used about the Spanish poet who wrote that and suggest that his volume We Were Not There, published last year by Shearsman Books , plots an ambitious journey of discovery in which we are challenged to examine not only our changing world but also those senses ‘the air interrogated questioned by a blank page’ (‘Guest’).

The blank page offers an invitation to the writer to pursue a horizon of discovery as in ‘Exploration’:

‘To go there where no one has ever been.
The place of all places, they said.
A fire burned me from within and there was no respite.
Wastelands, wandering clouds, some trees.
I kept on traveling toward my own borders.’

As William Blake’s Infernal Proverb had put it ‘No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings’ and to travel towards one’s own borders suggests a journey that has no predetermined conclusion. Journeys begin with the opening of doors but anticipation is more like an imaginative fiction, a glance through the glass, and as Louis Zukofsky put it ‘To see is to inform all speech’. Doce’s ‘Fiction’ opens with sight:

‘I didn’t want to open the door
nor for it to open before me:

the keyhole was all I needed
to pass through to the other side

and see the house where time
was buzzing in the kitchen

and we heard, in the distance,
the sea’s obstinacy,

the obedient crunch of the sand –’

One of the most striking elements of this collection of poems is that feeling of collaborative concern, that awareness of commonality, the record of experiences that permits us to recognise our common humanity. Doce brings into focus ‘Then’, that awareness that ‘When the world became the world / the light shone like always / upon an indifferent clock’. That world possessed an air that ‘was full of beginnings’:

‘and a thousand times in a thousand different streets
someone tripped on a stone
and this stone opened their eyes;
it was the moment we all waited for
to make the same decisions,
to again kiss the same ground,
to say the goodbyes of the day before;
and that beloved everyday face
that pretended to listen
or invited a distracted caress
once again pulled away too soon.’

Writing about Tomlinson, Jordi Doce quoted the English poet as explaining in an interview with a Spanish newspaper that ‘Europe has been built by its poets, and not by its politicians. Homer, Dante, Rilke have done more for Europe than all bureaucratic dispositions and governments.’ It seems entirely appropriate that Doce’s own ‘Una página, un jardin’ (‘A Page, A Garden’) should have as epigraph Tomlinson’s own lines:

‘A sudden blossoming of each character,
Of living letters, sprung from nowhere…’

The movement from Spanish to French in the title of Doce’s poem is given gentle force as we then read that ‘You step upon the humble tiles / and another floor gives way, neither here nor there, between two worlds that intermingle / at the tips of the toes.’

It is those toe-tips that set out on the journey in a manner not dissimilar to the way a pen’s mark on a page commences a new determination and Doce’s use of an extract from Goethe’s Diaries as an epigraph to his volume alerts the reader to the connections between movement and stillness: in a world of restricted journeying we are NOW and in a world of LOCK-DOWN we are aware of liberty:

‘Now that half of my life has passed I find that I have made but little progress, and I stand here like one who has barely escaped drowning and who is drying himself in the grateful rays of the sun’
J.W. Goethe, 1779

Ian Brinton 18th July 2020

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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

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Psycho-Neurological Poem in 3 Parts & A Clean Heart and a Cheerful Spirit by Felicity Allen (Litmus Publishing 2019)

Posted on May 18, 2019 by tearsinthefence
Psycho-Neurological Poem in 3 Parts & A Clean Heart and a Cheerful Spirit by Felicity Allen (Litmus Publishing 2019)

In the State run Panopticon of the ‘Institute of Psychology’ in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Big Nurse sits at a ‘centre of this web of wires like a watchful robot’. She tends ‘her network with mechanical insect skill’ and knows every second ‘which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the result she wants’. This is the world of the early Sixties in the United States of America. She works for what one patient calls the ‘Combine’, a large organization that aims to adjust the Outside as well as the Inside and according to Chief Bromden who has been there for longer than he can remember she has been ‘dedicating herself to adjustment for God knows how long’.
Felicity Allen’s astonishing illustrated ‘Poem in 3 Parts’ was written ‘in response to and from recordings made when visiting the Art Studio of the charity Perspektivy, situated in The Psycho-Neurological Centre No, 3’ outside St. Petersburg in Russia. The scene: a confined residential home in which most residents have either grown up or come from other orphanages at the age of eighteen. Qualifications for entry to the home: some type of disability ‘either at birth’ or in ‘early years’. Life inside: ‘the only activities generally offered to residents are watching television or eating. Numbers of inmates: ??? [‘Numbers are missing’].
Sound haunts the fragmentary lines of this poem and we both read and listen to the ‘Caged heirs’. William Blake’s voice of outrage from 1803 gave us a ‘Robin Redbreast in a Cage’ which put ‘all Heaven in a Rage’; Maya Angelou’s autobiographical writings, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came from 1969; Felicity Allen’s art as an ‘adventure into an unknown world’ is immediate, it is NOW. Her response to a reading of Angelou’s confrontation with a paternal world of sexual violence is to assert that ‘our function as artists’ is ‘to make you see the world our way not / his way’. Art and Music are assertions; look and listen to this remarkable book and foul up those Big Nurse wires as McMurphy does when he runs his hand through the glass window of her Nurse’s Station:

“I’m sure sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Gawd but I am. That window glass was so spick and span I com-pletely forgot it was there.”

Ian Brinton 18th May 2019

http://litmuspublishing.co.uk

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Along Mosaic Roads by Calliope Michail (The 87 Press Ltd)

Posted on November 12, 2018 by tearsinthefence
Along Mosaic Roads by Calliope Michail (The 87 Press Ltd)

This is a very promising debut collection of poems and I shall want to read more of Calliope Michail’s work. The words on the back cover of this handsomely produced little volume open up a sense of the mystery of travelling: “lyrical peregrinations that chart journeys into the real and imagined spaces of wanderlust, desire, origins and memory”. Contained within the margins of stasis, five sections of poetry titled ‘Standing on the Sun’, the reader is posed questions which prompt further enquiries about what is contained within the notion of journeying. One of these questions links the world of hope and memory, the routine of what expectations we carry with us when we venture beyond where we already are:

“Memory doesn’t always serve
the precise contours of a history or
is a rosary still a rosary if
the beads have lost their thread”

Memory of course is threaded with imaginative reconstruction and the past exists only as we now view it, narrate it: its contours will be constructed in the now. There is something enclosing about the chain of rosary beads which are designed to pull us back all the time to a set sense of obedience. Like the drawing pins, doubtless with prettily-coloured heads, that can be pierced into a wall-map to denote both where we have already been or where we have yet to go. They are placed there with a sense of achievement and aspiration and put on the wall to remind others of one’s well-travelled life! But Michail’s journeying is far more true to a real sense of wonder and as such it opens up far greater possibilities than the world of repetition or self-satisfaction:

“The map on my wall gets people

asking,

where are the pins? The pins on the

places

you want to see, but don’t want to see through eyes

alone

places to soak in the colours, inhale the

sounds,

listen to the stories that float like bubbles above the

smells

of the waterfalls of people in the subway; the

windows

and doors that you wrestle with, the

smog

of the wet grass and dry dirt and damp

sidewalks

ripe with the after-fumes of

dog-shit.”

The epigraphs to this important poetry debut are from Walt Whitman, unsurprisingly since he wrote his ‘Song of the Open Road’, and Charles Manson, more surprisingly (despite his connection to the fringe of the Los Angeles music industry) since he spent his last 46 years in California State Prison. As Manson is quoted “I don’t really go anywhere. You can’t move. Anywhere you go, you always there.” After all wherever you travel you take yourself with you and see through your own eyes; and as William Blake knew “The fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees”. Whitman’s quotation, however, opens up the road ahead as we hear that he believes “that much unseen is also here” and it heralds another ghost haunting this little book of poems, that of Jack Kerouac. As Calliope Michail puts it “things happen / and happen and / happen somewhere”. For her “time / moves” and it moves far away from “lInguIstIcmazes” and only concludes with the sun as “a mandar // in your palm”. In both ordering and sending…this poetry is on the move.

http://www.the87press.com

Ian Brinton 12th November 2018

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Fair by Martin Thom (Infernal Methods)

Posted on August 6, 2018 by tearsinthefence
Fair by Martin Thom (Infernal Methods)

The poem that Shelley wrote on the occasion of the 1819 massacre in Manchester was titled ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and that very word conjures up a world of deceit as though politicians, like Prufrock, prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet. In Shelley’s poem the poet meets “Murder on the way –” and he had a “mask like Castlereagh”:

“Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds flowed him”

Sidmouth, Home Secretary at the time of the Peterloo Massacre, appears

“Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.”

In this recently published chapbook poem we meet Sir Michael Fallon, Liam Fox and Amber Rudd.
Martin Thom’s long-term interest in Shelley is evident when we look at the front page of the fourth issue of the magazine he edited, Turpin:

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of men over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world… (‘A Defence of Poetry’)

And that evidence is there now in this recent publication from the Press whose name is taken from the poetry of William Blake. In this whirling explosion of outrage where the “Strict licensing of ordinance” is swiftly followed by the “margin of collateral” and “Harm to school or hospital” is delivered “In a hell-sent British shell” Thom’s eloquence of anger is revitalising.

“Eldon, Sidmouth, Castlereagh
Are in the stocks that Shelley made
And in the cuts that Cruikshank drew
Rotten fruit that outrage threw
Turn to emblems on the page.”

In the political world of Martin Thom’s poem the “devil dust” of modern warfare brings “mayhem to the mortal screen” and “infant hope, pale despair / In a second are not there”. The poem itself was drafted in the late summer of 2017 as preparations for the DSEI Arms Fair were under way at ExCel London, in London Docklands. Perhaps the nearest we have had recently to this bitter outburst of indignation about war was Tony Harrison’s A Cold Coming, Gulf War Poems published by Bloodaxe in 1991 and then, of course J.H. Prynne’s 2004 Refuse Collection where in the “curving / mirror of enlarged depravity daily and abhorrent a / comfort of disgust adjusted to market slippage”.

Ian Brinton, 6th August 2018

Infernal Methods: 1a Lupton Street, London NW5 2JA

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Black Book by Robert Vas Dias & Julia Farrer (Shearsman Books)

Posted on December 8, 2016 by tearsinthefence
Black Book by Robert Vas Dias & Julia Farrer (Shearsman Books)

This profoundly serious book is an oeuvre noir, ‘an ethical response to a range of contemporary atrocities and acts of inhumanity’ (Robert Hampson). The ‘Black Book’ has an authoritarian and punitive sense to it: if you do not fit in with the rules then your name will be entered in the ‘black book’. The power of the book was legendary and even Christopher Tietjens’s father in Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not held an implicit belief in the ‘great book’ in which a mark might be placed against your name, damning you for social elevation! But there is also the oeuvre au noir which forms part of the alchemical magic suggesting that a new world might be created from this current one. For that we might go to Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel about Zeno. If this powerful new work by Robert Vas Dias is not despairing of humanity it is because, as the Rector of St. James’s Piccadilly puts it on the back cover:

‘…black dwells just before the light shines and hurts my eyes. Black invites me to rest from the uninvited and exhausting battery of illusions that fill my days. A book that is black narrates stories of night-time experiments in the telling of truth.’

The Forward that Vas Dias writes focuses on a register of ‘our outrage at the inhumanity of humanity’ and the book that he and Julia Farrer have composed ‘is analogous to the ways in which war poets, war artists and photographers, and journalists have always worked and exhibited’. The subtitle of the book is ‘An Assemblage of the Fragmentary’ and the poet and the artist played around with the idea of ‘an art of fragments, an art that recapitulates the way in which we receive information in fragmentary form in media reports that start as necessarily incomplete stories’. Julia Farrer’s images were drawn on a computer using a 3-D program, ‘fragmented and manipulated randomly’; Robert Vas Dias’s writing combines a ticker-tape of text which bears witness to the suffering of the body under regimes of torture with, above it, a series of statements:

‘let us consider the forming of walls, the mortar

of words I use to form my walls, to make my side

a better side, the other side is where the other side

resides, I’m on the right side and you are not, the

side you’re on is undesirable and my side is right

because I am right and you are wrong…’

Juxtaposed against these words are shorter lines in red and they include such phrases as ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘surgical precision’. The walls that are presented here have little to do with Robert Frost’s famous lines concerning ‘Mending Walls’ but have more in common with William Blake’s sharp proverb of Hell: ‘Prisons are built with stones of law, Brothels with bricks of religion.’ The epigraph to this book is a statement from Tagore: ‘where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls’ and the fragmentary episodes threading a narrative throughout reveal ‘black sites’ where ‘anything went’.
This book demands to be read and its responses taken to heart:

‘for refugees it’s not about seeking a better life
it’s about having any life at all

I have a dream a world without borders
today more than ever’

Ian Brinton 8th December 2016

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Contemporary British Poetry by David Wheatley

Posted on January 17, 2015 by tearsinthefence
Contemporary British Poetry by David Wheatley

This is a recent addition to Nicholas Tredell’s fine series of Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism which are published by Palgrave and it is as ambitious and wide-ranging as we have come to expect from the series.

Opening with the required quotation from Adorno, ‘The recent past always likes to present itself as if destroyed by catastrophes’ David Wheatley guides us through a short labyrinthine history of ‘contestation and counter-contestation, each generation theatrically forswearing its precursor’. I am minded of the opening to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell published in the revolutionary times of 1793: ‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’. In Blake’s world-turned-upside-down ‘Good is the passive that obeys Reason’ and ‘Evil is the active springing from Energy’.

In chapter 5, ‘Experiment and Language’, there is a subsection titled ‘The dust of our wasted fields’ which opens up with a statement that is worth placing next to these ‘Contraries’:

‘Narratives of rupture and discontinuity will always be to the fore in discussions of modernism, but it is also worth insisting on deeper continuities. To Jeremy Noel-Tod, surveying the links between the experimental and Romantic traditions, Prynne’s project is “essentially Wordsworthian”, confirming affinities across centuries which only the vagaries of contemporary anti-modernism serve to obscure. Reading an early Prynne essay, ‘Resistance and Difficulty’ (1961), Noel-Tod uses the first of those terms to suggest an alternative to the more usual accusation levelled at Prynne’s poetics, unintelligibility. The Romantic landscape offers resistance to our too-easy progress, and requires careful thought and engagement before it can be negotiated. Landscape is encountered rather than mastered, in the sense that familiarity does not exhaust a Wordsworth landscape, whereas a field in the path of a motorway is recognised and assessed as an obstacle and swept aside.’

Given this emphasis it is no surprise, but a real delight, to read Wheatley on Harriet Tarlo’s wonderful Shearsman anthology of ‘Radical Landscape Poetry’, The Ground Aslant (published in 2011 and worth getting hold of NOW). This anthology which reports from what Wheatley refers to as ‘more marginal zones’ corrects, as he puts it, an assumption that British experimental writing operates in a realm either of rarefied abstraction or of metropolitan indifference to anything beyond the city limits. And it is within this context that he also then writes about the fine poem by R.F. Langley, ‘Matthew Glover’. When Langley was interviewed by Robert Walker (Angel Exhaust 13) he talked about the background to this poem:

‘I didn’t start writing until I found out about American poetry. There was Donald Davie at Cambridge who talked about Pound. But Davie never talked about Olson. It was really Olson who convinced me that I might write something myself. So that something like ‘Matthew Glover’ is a fairly naïve attempt to do a miniscule Olson in an English setting.’

I recall writing a review of the Harriet Tarlo anthology, soon after it appeared, for Todd Swift’s EYEWEAR publishing and since that review is still up there online I had a quick peek to remind myself what it was that I had found so refreshing and valuable about that book: ‘Language is a form in which landscape can come alive’.

David Wheatley’s overview of the contemporary scene is a balanced and intelligent one. Of course there are points at which we want him to say more but this is a ‘Readers’ Guide’ and its purpose is to point out features of the landscape which we can go and explore for ourselves. The test of a good book of this type is whether or not it can engage the reader with an infectious sense of enthusiasm that prompts him then to use the bibliography, the reading list, the list of further suggestions. This is a good book!

Ian Brinton 17th January 2015

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Tony Barnstone’s Beast in the Apartment

Posted on January 25, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Tony Barnstone’s Beast in the Apartment

Tony Barnstone’s Beast in the Apartment (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2014) comes with a book cover of William Blake’s etching of Cerebrus, the three headed creature, used to illustrate Dante’s Inferno, and hints at potential encounters. The beast in the apartment is a paper lion, rather than a tiger, that comes alive. Barnstone, (like his father, Willis Barnstone, the respected poet and New Testament scholar), is well travelled, an accomplished translator of Chinese poetry, with a solid grounding in religious studies and a number of poetic traditions. Indeed, his father appears and reappears throughout the book. Barnstone’s previous books include, The Golem Of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008), which exudes a joyful playfulness in its modern psalms, parables, testaments, sermons, sutras and gospels, and Tongue of War: from Pearl Harbor to Nagaski (BkMk Press, 2009), which offers multiple perspectives from found material from both sides of the Pacific conflict.  Both are well worth reading.

 

Beast in the Apartment, divided into five sections, with crisp narrative poems, traditional sonnets, repeated imagery and intriguing, yet not in-yer face, juxtapositions is perhaps more conventional than his earlier work. It works around a series of opposites or near opposites and has a smoothness and symmetry. The poem, ‘The Strangeness’, for example, with its hinted echoes of John Donne, follows a poem where Friedrich Nietzsche’s on the eve of mental breakdown sees a cab-horse flogged and begins to eat hunger, relates the experience of seeing a strange, dead creature washed up by the swale, to two sets of couples, (moving bodies, synced and unsynced) that disperse and separate as a memory trace.

 

the way in memory the people that we were

are just now shaking the sand off the blanket

 

and folding, and you take my arm and squeeze

the bicep as we walk to the car, and I shift my neck

to pilfer a last, small glance at the strangeness of it all,

of all we leave behind us, gleaming on the sand.

 

‘The Strangeness’ echoes later as one reads the sequence and considers whether the narrator’s encounter with Gwyneth on the beach is a matter of luck, randomness or fate, and whether we read the strange creature as an emblem of all our dead selves. The poem is skillfully placed to end the first section with its worship of women’s bodies and seemingly fatal and camouflaged world.

 

The second section has some fine sonnets, such as ‘Die’, with its amusing opening line, ‘One day your toe fell off, the tiniest toe’, and ‘Lamp or Mirror’, on the strangeness of self, with its last line, ‘The mirror breaks. I gasp awake. He’s here.’, which serves to add to the circular play of absence and presence, life and death, old self and new self. The third section follows watchmakers from Istanbul, his father dancing, and the thief of time, and segues into the fourth section titled after the medieval concept of rota fortuna, casting its shadow, dominated by a sequence of sonnets, odes to chaos and bags, and a plea to marry opposites:

 

And yet when starlight fills Yosemite

like dreams, then we might understand this call:

 

to put down iPhones, turn off HBO,

and find the hidden meadow, secret cove,

to turn back from the world we think we know

and enter the ecology of love.

 

The last section, the beast in the apartment, echoes the first and third sections and serves to produce a wonderful circularity that plays around with the themes of fullness and emptiness, order and disorder, life and death, past loves and new loves, movement of bodies, and saying goodbye to former selves, fumbling in the darkness of a new becoming.

 

 

David Caddy 25th January 2014

 

 

 

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