Wildcat dreams in the Death Light by Regan M. Sova

This review originally appeared in the Brazen head Here

Reagan M. Sova. Wildcat dreams in the Death Light. First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages.

 ‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’.

It’s rare for a blurb to be so accurate. For the price of the book, Reagan M. Sova will perform as ring master, troubadour, high wire artist and magician to entertain and dazzle the awestruck crowd.

 Set in the first decades of the 20th century, the story is told by Mort Sloman, who leaves home at thirteen. He falls in with a circus, falls in love with a Gypsy trapeze artist, discovers friendship across the barriers of race and difference, witnesses institutionalised racism, violent death and corruption, joins the Wobblies and unionizes his circus, travels through Europe during the First World War to Egypt, returns to America to help the union cause and finally performs the festival of light for his dead relatives.

 A lot happens.

 At the beginning, the narrator sets out on a quest, mounted on a mule rather than a white charger:

 i/consecrated unto myself the sacred mission
the ceremony of light to honor Frank and Aunt J
i had the song in hand but i
could not do it without the right guitar
nor the Locksmith keys
not even the rabbis have them 

While this quest gives the story a beginning and end, the ‘sacred mission’ fades into the background, replaced first by Sloman’s devoted pursuit of the gypsy acrobat, then by his experiences with the travelling circus, and his involvement in the IWW.

Although set in a world anchored in the familiar by historical names; The Ringling Brothers, Big Bill Hayward, Eugene V. Debs, The IWW; recognisable conditions; whites only hospitals, and historical events like the Frist World War, the story moves in a liminal space that shifts Sloman’s journey into the realm of legend.

The circus, which Sloman calls ‘The Kingdom’, is a ready-made symbol of America, with its outcast others, unusual characters labelled as freaks, and self-confident, exploitive hucksters and frauds. An American Dream where the poor boy escapes the bullies, finds love and wealth, and where the good guys find friendship and love and win despite the odds stacked against them.

The poem exploits its own intertextuality in a cheerfully unembarrassed way. There are echoes of Whitman and the Ginsberg of Howl. But the influences are taken and adapted. A rambling man bound for glory with guitar on his back, writing songs and supporting the union, evokes Woody Guthrie, but the verbal inventiveness of Sloman’s songs is a world away from Woody’s. Like Sloman’s parade, which begins with himself and his friend and grows throughout the story, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is robust and generous enough to accommodate whatever resonance the individual reader brings to the party.

The dominant stylistic presence, however, is Frank Stanford and The Battle Field Where the Moon Says I love you. Of all Sova’s many magic tricks, the most impressive is the way he  has managed to take Stanford’s instantly recognisable style, make it his own and adapt it to his own purposes.

By shortening Stanford’s line, leaving it unpunctuated and rarely end stopped, Sova has given the poem a rhythm which carries the reader through Sloman’s adventures. Stanford’s distinctive incantatory eruptions are present, but kept under control so they never take over the story the way they do in The Battlefield. They are a major factor in producing the slightly hallucinatory effect that keeps shifting the story from its factual, historical setting into the dream realm of legend.  

When Alf, the circus master, asks the 13 year old Sloman what he could have seen ‘with so few years under your cap’, he replies:

i have seen the elderly monk gored by the falling icicle
i have seen the family of elk sleeping next to me in the moonlight
i have seen bob’s jar of brandy
i have seen the vial of goof dust I used to trick the trickster
i have seen the blood trickling
from my grandfather’s ear when he died roller-skating
i have seen good luck without grace invite darkness
i have seen the Gypsy’s vision of my death by the mountain 

This early list is typical of the many that follow. They can include everything from the factual to the surreal, as Alf’s reply does. Sometimes it is not obvious how the items coalesce into coherence. Their exuberance often seems an enjoyable end in itself.

As well as contributing to the tone of the story, they serve another function. A long narrative poem needs variety in pace. A relentlessly onward rush becomes as boring as a story that goes nowhere. Part of Sova’s balancing act is to know when to allow the voice to narrate action without interruption, and know when to pause the narration and use the incantatory to add variety.

In the circus, the emperor’s armless great granddaughter plays the violin with her toes. As an image it’s simultaneously pitiful and ridiculous. Like the circus performers, the story risks absurdity. In the wrong hands, much of it would be silly. But the final magic trick, and perhaps the most subtle, is to make Sloman’s voice and story believable on its own terms and hold a reader’s attention for two hundred and fifty pages.

Stylistically assured, inventive, entertaining, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is that rare thing, a well-written narrative poem with a distinctive style creating a distinctive story world.

Review of William Carpenter's 'Eþandun: Epic poem'.

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this review was first published by The Brazen Head. https://brazen-head.org/2021/06/14/battles-royal/

Eþandun Epic Poem. William. G. Carpenter. Beaver’s Pond press. 2021. 252pp

Eþandun[1] is a narrative poem which tells the story of King Alfred’s actions between the Danish raid on Chippenham in midwinter 878 AD and his victory at the battle of Edington about six months later. It advertises itself on its cover as ‘Epic Poem’[2].

The orthodox version of literary history is that since the 19th century there has been a ‘lyricization’ of poetry in English. At the beginning of that century poetry was still the main vehicle for narrative, but it was gradually supplanted by the prose novel, until fictional narrative in prose became so common that ‘prose novel’ sounds tautological and ‘lyric’ became the default mode for poetry. 

Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, “a long poem,” is simply a flat contradiction in terms.’ People who may not have read his argument and might have gagged on some of his examples of ‘true poetry’ accepted his claims.[3] At the beginning of the twentieth century the most influential poets wrote long poems but avoided narrative. Despite the continuing popularity of narrative fiction in print and digital media, critics of the stature of Hugh Kenner and Marjorie Perloff were happy to announce that plot is obsolete (Kenner)[4] and narrative is undesirable (Perloff).[5] Post modernists, stuck up their theorised cul de sacs, invented ‘weak narrativity’ which stripped of its verbiage seems to mean telling a story by deliberately not telling a story.[6] The idea that poetry is just another form of entertainment became a heresy. 

There’s an element of truth in this potted narrative; it couldn’t be a critical orthodoxy if there weren’t, but poets have gone on writing book length narrative poems in blank verse, strict stanza forms, free verse, or sequences of diverse poems, and in doing so they have moved across most of the existing fictional genres.

One consequence of this historical development is that modern publishers often seem clueless when it comes to promoting a book-length, narrative poem. Eþandun is a good example. It’s an historical novel. The writer has done his research. He knows the period and he has invented a story full of incident and drama that fits within a fixed, historically accurate time frame. We might dispute the credibility of the story, but that’s part of the pleasure of reading historical fiction. 

It seems highly unlikely that Alfred hid in Guthrum’s camp disguised as a Welsh bard[7], even less likely that he became his unofficial adviser, staged a fake séance and debated religion with him. Carpenter’s battle at Edington is a miraculous victory for a vastly outnumbered English army. It was not regarded as miraculous by contemporaries. Anglo-Saxon armies had been trashing Danish armies for decades, the men of Devon destroyed one that same winter and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our major source for the battle, simply records both the raid on Chippenham and the victory at Edington. The personal combat between Alfred and Guthrum seems a definite mistake, historically implausible and anti-climactic, even if the end of Virgil’s epic is ghosting in the background.

But a reader could dispute those parts of the story while enjoying them, with the added pleasure of encountering incidents he or she wouldn’t have imagined. This is fiction, not history and fiction requires incident and drama. Carpenter’s story is full of both.

What percentage of the vast audience for Game of Thrones, Vikings, The Last Kingdom, Lord of the Rings etc. care about the quality of the prose they’re reading? Would they be put off if the lines didn’t go all the way to the right-hand margin? They could enjoy Eþandun and learn about the history of the period while they were doing it without worrying about the quality of the verse. There’s a vast audience out there, but the publisher sticks ‘Epic Poem’ on the cover and that means the book will be shunted into the poetry section, if there is one, where its natural readership will not find it. Put ‘Epic Poem’ on the cover and the book is reviewed by poetry editors instead of fiction reviewers. 

The dust jacket reflects the publisher’s confusion. What does it tell a prospective reader about the book? 

The title, Ethandun, spelt Eþandun seems needlessly pedantic. It’s not a famous battle like Hastings. Since most potential readers haven’t heard of it, aren’t going to know the sound value of the thorn (þ) and are going to be confused by the similarity between the a and d in the chosen font, it also seems needlessly uninformative.

If you don’t know what an Eþandun is the cover picture doesn’t help. It shows a generic ‘couple in the past’. If this is supposed to be Alfred and his wife, the latter is missing for most of the book, and when they do reunite, in the last chapter, Alfred’s loss of an eye has been stressed so often that the fact that he has two in the picture seems incongruous.  

Still seeking enlightenment, one reads the quotes on the back of the dust jacket. Typically, for a narrative poem, there is a failure to give an overview of the story. The only information states: 

‘It is 878 AD. In the struggle between Christian Saxon and pagan Dane, whose endurance, loyalty, and strategy-whose God or gods-will prevail?’

878 is not a well-known date. If you, reading this, know its significance, you belong to a very very small group. If on the other hand you know the date, then you know Alfred won. Suggesting there’s any doubt seems counter-productive. Hidden away on the front flap of the dust jacket is a succinct summary of the book. It ends, however, with a piece of strange and highly inaccurate hyperbole: ‘Eþandun paints Western Christendom in its darkest hour.’

As so often, the choice of approving quotations is also strange. There are two. 

‘Eþandun is a work of genius, of true poetry, and also a staggering piece of historical scholarship. It is utterly original in concept and execution’. 

This tells a potential reader nothing about the poem. As a statement it relies on the reader’s unwillingness to stop and consider it. It’s hard enough to define ‘poetry’ but what is ‘true poetry’? Certainly not the same ‘true poetry’ Poe was promoting. The phrase turns up on a baffling variety of poetry books and should be banned unless the user is willing to explain exactly what it is supposed to mean. Nor is this a ‘Staggering piece of historical scholarship’. I can’t imagine many historians being staggered by a three page bibliography. 

The second quote is even more strange: 

‘Carpenter’s Alfred is a wannabe medievalist’s delight. We don’t know much about the king who united Britain, but through Carpenter’s eyes, we imagine him.”

If this is ‘a wannabe medievalist’s delight’ should the genuine variety steer clear? 

 ‘We don’t know much about the King who united Britain.’ This is very true. Surprisingly little is known about Athelstan who did ‘unite’ Britain, but he was Alfred’s grandson and this book is not about him but about Alfred, who didn’t even unite England. We also know more about Alfred than about any other Anglo-Saxon king.

Carpenter knows most of what is known. One of the most striking aspects of this book is that Carpenter achieves that very rare thing: a story set in the ninth century, where the characters’ frame of reference is ninth century. It’s very impressive. It has nothing to do with ‘wannabe medievalists’. But the book’s main strength is also its major weakness. The research hasn’t been integrated into the fabric of the poem. It sits on top of it, calling attention to itself. 

On the run from the Danes, Alfred and his retainers are watching them ransack a religious institution, spitting babies on spears and molesting the religious. Alfred’s companion, Octa wants to leap to the defence of the weak and persecuted.

‘Can I behold such wickedness’ he murmured
as Athelred’s successor gripped his wrist.
‘You can behold’ said Alfred, ‘and you will.’ (p.51) 

Alfred’s response is terse and dramatic and suits the situation. It’s also believable. But then Alfred, who is also Athelred’s successor, launches into a forty-one-line speech, referring Octa to a list of historical situations that may have been much worse than the one they are in. This is not an isolated example. It’s a major stylistic characteristic of the text. Carpenter’s Alfred, like his narrator, has the irritating habit of launching into an historical disquisition at every possible opportunity. The story stops. Alfred speaks. At length. He sounds like a boring pedant. His retainers could have been forgiven for shanking him just so they could eat their meals in peace. 

Before the climactic battle, Alfred makes a speech to his gathered troops. In Carpenter’s version of events this is a desperate moment. He only has 318 fighting men. The model for such speeches in English poetry is Shakespeare’s Henry V. As a piece of ruthless, self-serving rhetorical manipulation Henry’s speech before Agincourt is perfect. But not one of Henry’s imaginary bowmen would have failed to understand everything he said.[8]

Carpenter’s Alfred says all he needs to say in 16 lines and then launches into a history lesson, piling up the examples which include King Ahab’s levies, Matathias’ son, Oswy, Abraham, the council at Nicea, a piece of erudite Greek symbolism courtesy of the Venerable Bede, and some typological exegesis surrounding Melchizedek, with the Spartan Leonidas thrown in at the end for good measure. We don’t know much about the men who made up the Wessex levies at Edington, but they would have been baffled rather than inspired. 

The ghost of G.K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse haunts any poet who attempts the story of King Alfred. Chesterton didn’t claim his story was historically accurate, and he used various ballad-like forms to give his poem an incantatory, dream-like quality. Carpenter opts for Blank Verse and his handling of this is deft, providing him with an unobtrusive, sometimes elegant vehicle for his narrative. Unfortunately, he breaks this with heavily alliterating lines that sound like fake medieval verse. Perhaps this delights ‘wannabe medievalists’ who have never encountered the real version. It’s difficult to imagine any Anglo-Saxon composing the clumsy equivalent of:

Begged to buy his butchered boardmate’s blood. (p. 46)

Old and Middle English alliterative verse was a flexible and sophisticated way of organising a line and offered subtle possibilities in rhythm and emphasis.[9] It’s very difficult to do in modern English for a variety of reasons. Carpenter has wisely decided not to use it. He opts instead for general alliteration, using it heavily at certain parts of the narrative. Imposed on Blank Verse this can be disastrous. The drummer is tapping ten or eleven beats and lightly stressing every second one, suddenly the bass player has decided to stress any random combination of beats. The lines begin to sound ominously like tongue twisters. 

Both bled, both blew, hearts hammered in both breasts 
As cupbearers brought them bread and beer.  (p.210)

When the alliteration is linked to Carpenter’s habitual circumlocution[10] and used to describe combat, the result is confused. 

and Wulf went in forthwith. Poor Wulf was fined
a foot, but soon the Somersetan swung
south of Sigewulf’s stroke, which, Sherbourne’s shield,
discerning, drove his troll wife down the troll road
cleared by the killer’s ward as careful Alfred
aimed his edge and nicked the bristled neck. Wulf
lobbed his limb at the snout, Sigewulf struck
brawn, and the bitch chomped the carl’s calf. (p. 13)

It’s true that heroic poems from Y Gododdin to ‘The Battle of Maldon’ detail the deaths and deeds of individuals in combat. But the original audiences probably knew the participants, or had heard of them, and were familiar enough with combat to be fascinated by the blow by blow accounts. The descriptions are rarely, if ever, confusing. In the 21st century those conditions don’t apply. ‘Poor Wulf was fined a foot’ sounds needlessly precious and unnecessarily vague: ‘lobbed his limb at the snout’ bordering on parodic. I do not know what ‘discerning drove his troll wife down the troll road’ means.  

Is Eþandun Epic Poem an Epic poem?

 The answer depends on your definition of Epic and defining Epic is an entertaining critical game, if you enjoy such things. The arguments have produced a small library, like the larger one attempting to define Lyric. The standard critical manoeuvre is to survey contending definitions of Epic from Aristotle onwards, and then pick whichever one allows the critic or writer to do whatever they were always going to do. Like the attempts to define Lyric, the game has little pragmatic value.

 Eþandun is certainly a long poem that wants to be taken seriously but it raises the more interesting question of whether or not it is possible, in the 21st century, to write, ‘A war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil’ which is the claim on the inside of the dust jacket. 

David Jones was probably the last person to achieve this, with In Parenthesis. He was describing a war his readers had fought in. Christopher’s Logue’s War Music is the positive answer to the ‘war poetry’ part of that question. But Logue wasn’t trying to out Homer Homer. Then is not now, and he built this into his poem, using all the techniques available to a modern English poet. 

Virgil’s audience were trained in the use of weapons, and accepted combat as a natural part of their lives. Martial skill was admirable. No one living today has fought in a dark age battle. That might be the crucial difference between a Roman Aristocrat who has fought in the Empire’s wars listening to the final combat in the Aeneid, and a modern audience reading that passage or Carpenter’s imaginary combats. 

For the original audiences of Homer and Virgil, the past was a very different place: gods interacted with humans while larger than life heroes stalked about the earth. In the 21st century we split History, which is (hopefully) evidence based and factual, from a thing called Fiction which is a culturally sanctioned form of lying. The split is very recent, certainly post-medieval. Today we dispute the ‘historicity’ of the Trojan war. If it happened, then it didn’t happen the way it does in the Iliad. We look for evidence it might have happened, framing its possible causes in terms of economics and expansionist politics. 

Virgil and Homer were creating poems that sprung from a shared belief in the truth of their stories, built on a shared knowledge of the past. It’s almost impossible for a modern reader not to read the Aeneid as a form of historical fiction; a high-class Roman Marvel Comic with suited superheroes and bickering gods. The suspension of disbelief we’ve learnt from reading and watching fiction automatically takes over. For the original audience this was the foundation story of Rome. 

A poem written in the tradition of Virgil would have to negotiate the fact that most people no longer believe gods walk on the earth.; or that victory in battle proves that God prefers your cause to your defeated enemy’s; or that sword swinging killers are sufficient role models for the problems of the world adults live in. Heroes of the superhuman stature of Aeneas or Achilles belong now in the world of fiction and are diminished by this. There was a King Alfred, and he was bound by all the contingent forces of his place and time and essential humanity. He was extra-ordinary. But if we admire Alfred as an historical figure, it’s not because he won a battle, but because of his reforms after Edington. They are hardly material for a dramatic war poem in the style of Virgil. 

Carpenter’s Alfred is not the historical man. Nor is he a believable representation of that historical man. However, fiction has requirements history will not provide. Eþandun is historical fiction: entertaining and thought provoking even when it’s at its most implausible. 

 

Virgil was not writing fiction. 

 

 

Notes

[1] The title, with a modernised spelling would be Ethandun. The place of the battle is usually given as Edington. 

[2] ‘Eþandun Epic poem’ on both dust jacket, copyright and title page. Eþandun on the book’s spine and cover.

[3] Poe, E.A. (1846) briefly in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’. http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm and in more detail in (1850) ‘The Poetic Principle’. http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/poetprnd.htm. Poe’s attempt to define ‘True Poetry’ comes in the penultimate paragraph of this latter essay.

[4] Kenner, H. (1951) The poetry of Ezra Pound. (p. 262).

[5] Perloff, M. (1985) The dance of the intellect: studies in the poetry of the Pound tradition (p.161).

[6] See for example Brain McHale’s (2004) The obligation toward the difficult whole. and the same writer’s contribution to the RoutledgeEncyclopedia of Narrative Theory.in the entry for ‘Narrative in Poetry’.

[7] Like the story of the burnt cakes, the story of Alfred visiting the Danish camp as a harper first appears in the 12th century.

[8] In Old English, Byrhtnoth’s speeches to the Viking messenger in ‘The Battle of Maldon’ is a less well known, but historically more appropriate example of direct, effective, dramatic speech. 

[9]  Essentially a line with four stresses. Three of the beats are stitched together with alliteration. The last beat rarely carries alliteration. 

[10] I counted ten ways in which Alfred is named in the poem before I stopped counting. 

Maurice Scully's 'things that happen'.

things that happen, Shearsman Books, 2020.

The first complete publication of a project that has lasted 25 years.

Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that happen’.

Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that happen’.

It’s that time of year. At the time of writing, the T.S. Eliot prize shortlist has been announced and soon we will be treated to the usual critical contortions as judges, journalists and those in the know reach for the usual terms of praise; ‘Ground breaking’ ‘Innovative’. ‘Original’, ‘Genre bending’ and so forth and so on to try and distinguish one book of well written poems from another.

Shearsman’s announcement in 2020 that they were publishing a one volume edition of ‘Things that happen’ should have been hailed as one of the publishing events of the year. Of course it wasn’t.  But if you want to see what genuine ‘ground breaking’, ‘original’ ‘innovative’ ‘sui generis poetry’ is like, you need to read this book. 

It’s fascinating and baffling, endlessly enjoyable, and it raises all kinds of questions about what you do when you read, and the problems of verbalising the pleasure given by a poem that refuses to do the box ticking manoeuvres of the kind of poetry and poems that win the T.S.Eliot prize.  

I first encountered Maurice Scully’s work by accident. I bought a second hand copy of Livelihood. I was fascinated because it was like nothing else I’ve ever read. There were echoes, similarities, there has to be, but the thing itself was unique in my experience. It was also compulsively enjoyable. 

A few years ago, as part of a PhD, I read as many as possible of the book length long poems, narratives or sequences that had been written since the beginning of the last century.  Most of the works shared a great deal in common, most were what you’d call ‘well-written’, some were enjoyable, many I would never bother to read again and some I wondered if my presence as a reader was necessary. But I quickly discovered that my initial impression about Livelihood was sustainable. It is one of the few books on that ridiculously long bibliography that is unlike anything else.

I didn’t know anything about Scully the Poet. Over the years, I made desultory attempts to find information but to this day I haven’t met anyone else who reads him. I am happy to believe that he is a fictional character, dreamed up by Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett who had become bored by the afterlife and had entertained themselves by designing a truly modern poet: indifferent to biography, they had only sketched in suggestive details: there was a house, and a wife called Mary and children. The house was in Ireland, then Africa, maybe somewhere else, Italy? 

In the best Beckett tradition though, their story was about a penniless poet who spent his time in a tin shed writing poetry. The fact that the shed was made of tin was crucial. It should have the complete works of De Selby lying scattered on the floor and a fractured map of eternity on the roof. The poet listened to the rain and the birds and the rust forming on the roof and made it all into poetry. 

And he kept writing. For 25 years, issuing the product in hard to find pamphlets and books. And now the whole thing is between one set of covers and easily available.

Almost as exciting was Shearsman’s announcement that there would be a companion book of essays devoted to the poet. Hopefully there would be erudite insight and enlightenment on offer. Maybe someone could explain why this is so enjoyable?

And while I have nothing intelligent to say about ‘things that happen’ except that anyone interested in modern poetry should read it, the essays require a longer post all to themselves.

Jeremy Hooker's Selected Poems 1965-2018

 

Jeremy Hooker: Selected poems 1965-2018 (Shearsman 2020)

It’s a strange feeling to hold a man’s writing life between two covers, and it would be presumptuous to pretend to be able to ‘asses’ it on such short acquaintance. But the book is very good. One of the great joys of interest in poetry is that there are always so many fine poets to discover. Ignorance is a fine place to begin, as long as you take it as a place to leave. 

My prior Knowledge of Hooker is limited to the fact he was the author of a ‘pioneering study’ of David Jones, which I admire.( ‘David Jones, an exploratory study of the writings’ (1975).

I bought the selected because the blurb named David Jones and George Oppen as formative influences and I was having difficulty trying to imagine how anyone could combine those two very different writers.

The poems in the selected are grounded in places and things. They epitomise what Donald Davie called ‘a poetry of right naming’. In full knowledge of the slipperiness of words, or the slippage of the signifier if you want to be French, the poet doesn’t ‘Flinch’ into language or in it (to misquote Seamus Heaney) but tries to be as precise as possible. 

What I love is the fact of it. 

A channel kept open, shipping
stone for the cathedral;
blue Cornish slates;
coal from Woodmill
to Blackbridge Warf. 

A channel used, disused,
restored, until the last bridge
passed under the railway bridge
now abandoned, framing
water that is going nowhere, 
but silts, with passages 
the colour of stonedust
and boys rowing, a surface
silver and boiling
where blades dip and turn. 

from Itchen Navigation p. 102 (last stanza omitted)

The resultant poetry is lucid and compulsive. I can’t remember the last time I read a selected poetry from start to finish and then went back and read it all again. Although Hooker discusses the idea of Ground in the essay at the back of the book, and in more detail in his recently published essays , ‘Art of Seeing: essays on Poetry, Landscape painting and Photography’ (Shearsman 2020), the places in the poems shift: the Solent, Wales, Holland, The Holy Land. The poet is not so much tied to place as exploring places.

The book also provides on answer to a writing conundrum.

What kind of poem would you arrive at if you avoided a regular rhyme scheme and the predictable rhythms that gave melody and memorability to so much poetry in English written before the 20th century?

And then went further. If you avoided the tricks of the Avant Garde: no pyrotechnics, no disordered syntax or paratactic clauses? If you refuse to treat the poem as some kind of puzzle that the reader is invited to solve? If you were to avoid ‘clever’. 

If you avoided the thesaurus, and choose words you’d use in normal speech placed in normal order. If you avoid the temptation to be ‘poetic’, not pretending to thoughts and insights no one ever has in any given situation? And if you avoid the temptation to show off your considerable reading by dropping in allusions to other poems and poets? 

 If you avoid the selfie poem, where the words on the page are the debris left by your incessant scratching at your private itch, hoping your readers will sympathise with your pain for the length of time it takes them to scroll down to the next offering?

Take all that out and how might you end up with anything worth reading? 

One answer would be Hooker’s selected  poems. It’s the absence of the usual tricks of the trade that make them hard to discuss.  What to praise in words used carefully with a respect for the thing described. An unobtrusive control of rhythm. Poem as record of an intelligence moving through a landscape and recording its impressions, inviting the reader to not only look at what is being presented, but to look more carefully at the world he or she is moving through where-ever that might be?

Reading the selected reminds me of reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters. After reading Rusin on clouds, or light on water, you may never paint a picture, but you from time to time you find yourself paying attention to the detail in what you’re looking at. 

Hooker’s poem have the same effect. As he wrote about R.S.Thomas: 

We have heard his voice.
It will not be unheard. 

We have looked with his eyes.
What he has seen
will colour our seeing. 

                        ‘Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron’  p. 251

 And that is a gift gratefully received.

Merion Jordan's Regeneration

Merion Jordan 'Regeneration’

White Book/Red Book Seren 2012

This is the second book I’ve been reading which retells stories from the Mabinogion. If Mathew Francis’ ‘The Mabinogi’ (see previous post) raises the question of how to retell the stories, Merion Jordan’s ‘Regeneration’ poses the questions of what C.S. Lewis, in his discussion of Obscurity in Poetry, in his introduction to another writer’s revision of Arthurian matter, called ‘Privatism’ and ‘Unshared background’.

Warning…confusion in Progress.

Jordan’s book is a very ambitious take on the stories in the Mabinogion and the Arthurian story, split into two discrete sections.  

If you are reading Regeneration/Red book, you arrive at page 68 to be confronted on the facing page by upside down text and page number 84. Turning the book over, and starting at what was the back, you can now read the White book from page one to page 84.  Two front pages, two lots of ‘front matter’. This is cute.

Whether it was worth the publisher’s effort to print a book like this is a different matter. It’s hard to see what would have been lost by presenting it as a single volume split into two discrete parts.

It also seems indicative of the overall problem the book has: it’s been over thought. Concept has been privileged over execution and the result is intriguingly uneven.

Regeneration Red Book

Regeneration Red book has short poems responding to the stories in the Mabinogion. These short poems are split into four ‘books’. They are lyrical responses to the characters and incidents, aslant and non-narrative. The writing is lyrical, taut and impressive. 

Because these poems are responses to the story, they raise the inevitable question of what C.S.Lewis called ‘unshared back ground’. If you don’t know who Goewin was, the poem on page 32 isn’t going to tell you, and whether the poem ‘makes sense’ without that knowledge is a moot point. Whether it will reshape your reading of her story if you know it, is another.    

In his preface to Regeneration Red book Jordan writes: 

The tales’ ‘…reading, I think, depends upon an involvement not only with the space and shape of the stories but upon a landscape that is half real, half imaginary, a kind of Britain that is centuries out of reach-so interspersed with these characters and wonders I have attempted to map some of the insular localities they sought to define, the discarded components of a Britain that never was, except in the minds of the British’.  

The four ‘Insula’ sections which alternate with the four ‘books’ contain some of the best poems in a book of fine poems. 

In terms of concept and achievement the red book is superb. I would have raved about it at length if I had come across it as a single collection.

However, I’m not so sure about Regeneration White book.

Regeneration White Book

For a start its link to the White Book of Rhydderch seems very tenuous. Perhaps too tenuous to justify the split upside down halves.

It’s a sequence of poems each what might loosely be described as monologues spoken by a range of Arthurian characters. Although Malory is being leant on heavily, the familiar Englished names have been Welshed and the characters drift in and out of versions of the legend. This works as a reminder of the fluidity and variety of Arthurian stories.  There are after all, only versions.

But I find it difficult to hear a difference in the voices or to care about them or their perspectives. Given a life long obsession with Malory, this is surprising. The condensed lyricism of the Red Book has given way to something much more diffuse and while there are localised moments of linguistic interest, they get lost. 

To complicate matters further, Jordan writes in his preface:

‘Where I have found some point of contact between the inevitable shape of Arthur’s story and the shape of my own memories, I have tried to bring them together through annotation.’ 

These annotations, presented as foot notes, link the figure of Arthur to Jordan’s memories of his family, and especially his grandfather. 

‘I suspect that too much precision would risk obscuring the reader’s relation to Arthur in favour of my own. Fitting my own notes to the main text, in short, was my attempt to identify Arthur and bring a grief deeply felt but tenuously experienced to light: I have tried to leave room for the reader to do the same’.

It’s a very ambitious aim, and ambition is no bad thing. But it doesn’t work in execution. The footnotes, which are Jordan’s family memories, intrude, interrupt, distract. 

My copies of Malory are scrawled with maginalia. If you annotate your own books, the annotations are your personal response to the text. If Jordan’s footnotes are his equivalent, then in making such annotations public he’s claiming they are of interest to a third party, without making an effort to make them interesting or coherrent.  It’s a strange way of muddying a public act of self-revelation. 

In rewriting the story Jordan has already privileged his relation to the Arthur story. It is the writer’s privilege to do so; to offer his or her version for the reader’s consideration. It would have been enough to do that and leave it there.

The footnotes seem far too arbitrary. Too personal. They are examples of what Lewis called ‘Privatism’, the links are not often obvious to a third party and leave the writer and reader stuck between two stools. 

For example, Poem 12, Le Chevalier Mal Fet, begins:

He coughs up blood
She sleeps alone
Dreams of the fire
The love that melts bone
  To the blackened bone.

There is footnote on the first of the two ‘bones’. It begins…’You see it’s sometimes hard to reconcile my memories of my grandfather with the man he clearly was….’ There’s nothing in the rest of that footnote that links Grandfather, Jordan’s inability to imagine him as a school boy, and what’s happening here in the poem. 

Regeneration White book is an ambitious approach to the Arthurian story, but its conceptual underpinning seems ill conceived. It’s possible that I haven’t reread it enough times or I’m missing something. But I think it’s more likely that on one level the sequence is too private to work for a reader, and on the other the various voices aren’t differentiated enough to hold a reader’s interest.

David Jones’s ‘The Grail Mass and Other Works’.

David Jones’s ‘The Grail Mass and other Works’. Edited by Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Collision. Bloomsbury, ‘Modernist Archives’, London etc 2019

This is a publication by ‘Modernist Archives’. The editorial statement claims Bloomsbury’s ’Modernist archives’ series ‘makes available to researchers at all levels historical archival material that can reconfigure received views of modernist literature and culture’. 

This book cost me over two hundred Australian dollars, so I have to wonder what that ‘at all levels’ means. The first question to address then, is that if you’re not an institution, but an admirer of Jones’s work, and you save your pennies or cents to buy a copy, is it worth it?

The answer, in this particular instance, is an unqualified yes.

Firstly, it’s a beautiful book. Nice binding, boards, good paper, good font. It sounds daft, but there are familiar fragments in here, and they are much more enjoyable to read on good white paper in a clean font than in the slightly slurred font on stale paper that is my Faber copy of ‘The Sleeping Lord and other fragments’ (To save time, hereafter TSL).

Secondly there is a lot of material here and some of it is in the ‘not seen before category’. ‘The Grail Mass’ is reconstructed as a coherent sequence/poem from Jones’s manuscripts into approximately 126 pages of text. Some of this has appeared before as published fragments, some was integrated into ‘The Anathemata’, but the presentation of the whole realigns the fragments. More on this later. 

There are two further sections of writing: one called ‘A True fragment, an Extraction and A Variation’, and the other ‘Origins and Endings’.  

In total something like 200 pages of Jones’s writing.  

There’s also a critical apparatus detailing how the text was put together from manuscripts, how the versions here differ from other printed versions, and a guide of sorts to the grail mass. My previous experience of critical writing on David Jones lead me to ignore all this the first time I read the book. This was probably unfair. Without the painstaking work of the editors I wouldn’t be reading the book but Jones tends to exceed his exegetes far more thoroughly than most writers.

However, quite unintentionally the ‘Guide to the Grail Mass’ does raise one of the defining problems of reading David Jones. The editors identify the speakers in the first three segments. It’s hardly earth shattering.

But the effect of this simple piece of information on rereading the poems is like walking through an opened door into a realigned landscape. The question, which I have no answer to, is given that the ‘dramatic monologue’ is the basic form of several of these pieces, what did Jones gain by not indicating who is speaking, so the reader was orientated from the start?  

The next question: Given that Jones himself was unsatisfied with the project, and didn’t feel it was ready for publication, does rifling through his files and reconstructing it, do his memory justice. 

And again, the answer has to be yes. 

The editors claim that ‘It is our contention that the parts forming the Grail Mass…can be read as continuous and unified whole that can be judged on its own merit’.

I think they’re right. The Grail Mass, as presented here, stands comparison with both In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, with two qualifications, that it is unfinished, and his speakers: Judas, Caiaphas, his Roman Soldiers, humanise the material in a way that’s missing from The Anathemata. It’s funny in places, recognisably human, with all the poetry intact.

So you’ve got a copy of ‘The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments’, or ‘The Roman Quarry’. Do you need this book?

I’d say yes. Although Jones quarried the unfinished project and published fragments, they take on a new life when re-contextualised, presented in the sequence they grew out of. High Priests, grumbling squaddies and troubled tribunes add to, confirm, contradict and redefine each other’s views of the world in a structured movement that mimics the layering of detail Jones used in some of his paintings. Bunting’s ‘Then is now’ has rarely been taken so seriously and dramatized so thoroughly. 

And, again, it sounds daft, but the reading experience is much more enjoyable moving through the sequence, rather than reading the isolated fragments. 

The versions published here are also different from those previously published, which allows insight into Jones’ working methods.  Some of which I find baffling.

The irony of the book’s price is that you could give this Grail Mass to any reader of poetry, let them know who is speaking, and it could win Jones far more readers than those who have shipwrecked trying to read The Anathemata.

If you are a devotee of Jones’ writing, and there must be one or two more out there, you probably need a copy of this book. For once the content is definitely worth the daunting price of admission 

'Casket' by Andy Brown

Casket by Andy Brown. Shearsman Chapbooks, 2019. (31 pages)

I like this short collection very much.

The Casket in question is the The Frank’s Casket, a ‘whale bone’ box dating from the eighth century, covered with Runic inscriptions and almost cluttered with intricately carved and often enigmatic scenes.

For readers interested in Old English Poetry, the Casket is accidentally iconic. The cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Michael Alexander’s ‘The Earliest English poems’ (1966), which contained those ground breaking translations of Old English,  was a slightly blurred image from one of its panels. It is a pleasure to see the thing in the British Museum. And astonishing to see how small it is.

Brown’s chapbook consists of five poems, or five short sequences, one for each of the side panels, one for the lid. It’s very good.  I like the way it ghosts Old English.

Each poem begins with the relevant runic inscription and takes off from there. A note from the author explains the runic alphabet. Each rune has an equivalent letter and what Brown calls a ‘pictorial’ value… the word for Fish in runic script also contains the values for ‘wealth’ ‘ice’ ‘sun’ and ‘torch’’.  ‘To write the following poems I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word, and then used these images or variants of them, to write the poems’ (p.5).

As a concept, it’s interesting, but it puts conceptual intelligence into the architecture of the poems, where I think it should be. Whether or not you can map the runes directly onto the poems, and how much latitude Brown allowed himself in that ‘variants of them’, would require far more time than I’m willing to dedicate to the effort of finding out. The poems stand as poems.

The collection is thematically linked by the last line ‘…this shared and ever constant now’. The chapbook presents ‘the place where I live’ (coyly unspecified in a book about place)  as a palimpsest: modern golfers play where Britons and Saxons fought. On the water, New Foundland cod boats set sail and pass Danish raiders and ‘Dunkirkers’ coming home, while Flemish privateers have landed to burn the town.  Glimpses of history mingle with scenes from the present, graffiti’d bridges and frozen allotments, trail bikers and fishermen.

The poetry itself is skilfully written. The first sequence, ‘Whalebone’ picks up the echo of Old English alliterative verse. The Anglo-Saxon line with its triple crash and bang doesn’t sound good if sustained in modern English, so Brown’s handling of it here is skilful, evocative of Old English, giving the poem an onward movement but without sounding heavy handed:

This unforgiving trade, when the ice
Of February frets the core and fingers
And the sun’s declining disk smoulders
Barely bright enough to light the creek. 

The nod towards Old English is also beautifully done towards the end of the fifth section. One poem, beginning ‘I sing’ blurs the distinction between the Casket, its maker and the poet, since all three are ‘singing’:  the lines evoke the epigrammatic mood of Old English. 

This leads to that most Old English of poems, ‘the thing speaking’….(’prosopopoeia’ is not a word I get to type very often.)

Snatched from the creature’s warmth
And brought into the sun
I’ve made this voyage to artful box 

This sounds like the beginning of one of the Exeter book riddles. But ‘For month’s I knew the workman’s hands’ leads into the bone’s description of how it became a casket and we’ve moved from riddle to something more affecting. My candidate for ‘the best piece in the book’.

The last fourteen lines in the chapbook seem to offer some kind of conclusion, but I think they are perhaps the least convincing piece/s of the collection. The tendency of OE to epigrammatic, generalising is captured in

We have the measure of our lives all wrong
it’s not this time of flesh and blood alone,
but the slow millennia of dissolution,
when skin and bone return to whence they came

But the sudden shift from the previously specific ‘I’ to the vague ‘we’ and the equally generalised statement which slides off the fact the Casket has, after at least a thousand years, most definitely not returned to whence it came, might be the only flaw in the collection.. 

My only reservation may be irrelevant and whether you see it as criticism or observation depends on what you want from the poems you read.

As a reader of poems, and buyer of poetry, there are thousands of books to choose from. But increasingly I feel it doesn’t really matter. There are varying degrees of technical competence but at the end of some collections I wonder if life would have been any worse for not reading them. 

The problem facing writers and readers of contemporary poetry is that lurking, ‘Nice.. but so what? ‘

Bunting wrote ‘Then is now’ and produced Briggflatts . Eliot spun whorls with time past and time present being simultaneously present in time future. David Jones started with the idea of a past permanently present in the language and built In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. The idea of ‘a shared and ever constant now’ has been the starting point of some major poetic writing.

If you read Casket, you’ll never look at the Frank’s casket the same way again. Which is a good thing, though looking at the Frank’s Casket is not something most of get the chance to do very often.

If you live in England and don’t realise you are living in a place with a deep and varied history, some of it still visible around you, the collection might wake you up to that fact.

But if the last fourteen lines offer a conclusion, they are perhaps the least convincing piece/s of the collection. For all the verbal skill, there’s a step not taken, and ‘so what?’ is doing a passable impersonation of Grendel, lurking on the edges of the reading. Whether you let him or not depends on you. If you let him in, the effect is disastrous.

 I don’t know if this is an observation or a criticism.

 

Pierre Michon, 'Winter Mythologies' and Faking the Middle Ages.

 

 ‘Winter Mythologies’ contains two collections of very short stories by Pierre Michon: “Three Miracles from Ireland’ and ‘Nine passages from the Causse’.

Michon is a fascinating writer and there is so much to admire about these stories.  But what intrigues me is the way he fakes the middle ages, provoking the question: how to retell medieval stories, or stories set in the middle ages when it comes to dealing with matters of belief. 

Yale University Press publishes the English version, translated by Ann Jefferson, as Winter mythologies and Abbots. In the French ‘Edition Verdier’ Mythologies d’hiver the first three stories are called Trois Prodiges En Irlande. While prodige can be translated into English as miracle, it can also mean prodigy, which can apply to a thing or event as much as a person. ‘The fervor of Brigid’, ‘The sadness of Columbkill’ and ‘The levity of Sweeney’ are all prodigious. But none of them is a miracle in the religious sense of that word.  

At first glance they mimic the brevity of the medieval chronicles Michon purports to be using. But on closer rereading, it becomes obvious that Michon tells them from the view point of a skeptical modern sensibility, within the framework of modern understanding and belief and this leads to what I will call, for want of a better term, faking the middle ages.  

Medieval miracle stories are commonplace. Read Bede, or Gerald of Wales, read any early medieval chronicle, they are full of stories of the miraculous.  So are saint’s lives and the records of their cults and shrines. People went on pilgrimage in the honest belief that the Saint’s relics would cure them.

We know there were fakes and we know there were skeptics even in the early middle ages, but the evidence suggests that the majority believed in miracles; in the ability of saints to intercede on their behalf and the fact that while the world worked to laws that existed but were not well-understood, God had the ability to alter those laws to show His favor, displeasure, or power. It should also be remembered that there are still people who hold these beliefs.

Michon’s three Irish Stories refigure belief as a prodigious type of desire in search of an object. But this is a desire for something more than the tactile world can provide. It is an innate yearning that can never be satisfied.

In the first story, Bridgid wants to see God’s face. She is in earnest, so much so that she will kill herself and her sisters for the chance of seeing him. In the second, Columbkill wants a copy of the Psalter he has read. Denied his copy, in what’s sometimes called the first copyright case in Europe, he goes to war in order to own the original.

Both Brigid and Columbkill want, in both the older and more common usage of the word. In Michon’s perfect phrase, Columbkill discovers ‘The book is not in the book’ :‘Le Livre n’est pas dans le livre’.  We can’t know if Brigid saw the face of God. Having killed her sisters and committed suicide, her story ends: “They are implacably dead. They are contemplating the face of God’ (P.11). The lack of any grammatical link between the two sentences does not inspire confidence in the idea that one leads to the other or that the first is not a comment on the second.

Columbkill however, got what he wanted only to discover that the thing he gained is not the thing he wanted. ‘He searches the text for something he has read and cannot find, and the picture for something he has seen and which has vanished. He searches long and in vain, yet it was there when it wasn’t his’ (p.16).  Learning his lesson, he throws away the book and his warrior’s paraphernalia and, ‘…on the bald island of Iona he sits down, free and stripped of everything, beneath a sky which is sometimes blue’ (p.16).

If a defeated Columbkill learns to become ‘stripped of everything’ and accept the world as it is, then in the first three stories only Sweeney is happy with who he is and what he does. He is happy being a king. When Finbar curses him, he takes to the woods and lives as though he had become a bird. He is happy being a wild animal. Michon doesn’t say whether Sweeney’s acceptance of his life is a kind of sanity bordering on sanctity, or proof positive he’s mad.

While Michon is prepared to believe in the desire for what is not present, his attitude towards medieval faith is that of a modern skeptic.  At first sight his pared back prose seems to imitate the style of the medieval chronicles. But on closer inspection the stories are told in three voices. There’s the flat style which sounds like objective reportage. Brigid and her sisters go swimming:

‘All three girls run through the spring dawn. They reach the bottom of the embankment and throw their clothes under the foliage’ (p. 5).

But the reportage is often disturbed by Michon’s adjectives. When Columbkill gives up everything and moves to Iona he crosses the ‘loathsome Irish Sea’ (p. 16). Why is the Irish sea ‘loathsome’?  And who thinks it’s loathsome: Brendan or Michon?  Brigid, swimming, sees that her flesh is ‘excessive’. Later when Patrick sees the sisters in the water, we are told ‘they are flagrant and excessive’. What is flesh in excess of? The similes that follow, ‘Like a dreaming King’ in the first example, ‘like Grace itself’ in the second, are not helpful. What does ‘Implacably dead’ mean?  

If the adjectives disturb the reportage, Michon’s third voice is the voice of the knowing modern skeptic. People in the past believed in Miracles, and gave witness to them. Michon translates that belief into a desire for the non-existent: there are no miracles, only things that can be explained away.

When Saint Patrick is introduced in the first story we are told that to convert the pagan Irish, ‘il suffit de quelques abracabras druidiques’ which sounds even more contemptuous than the English translation’s ‘all it requires is a few druidic spells’. Patrick is a fake who knows he’s a fake: a conjurer who is growing old.  ‘He would like a real miracle to occur, just once’ (p. 5). This desire explains his treatment of Brigid as does the sublimated sexuality between them which is hinted at in the story.

Because they are juxtaposed in the one book, it’s possible to read the story of Saint Enimie, which runs through five of the Nine Passages on the Causse, as an elaboration on a form of dishonesty. If people can suffer in varying degrees from a prodigious desire for something that is absent, then religion is what you get when that desire is given an object. Inherent in that idea is that manipulation and exploitation are inevitable. Those who desire can be manipulated and exploited by those who can supply and claim to control that object. It’s how advertising and propaganda work. It is hardly an earth-shattering observation until it is applied to religion and Medieval faith.

What Michon does not say is that today Saint-Enimie is a place, and that her existence as a historical person is dubious. She doesn’t warrant an entry in the standard dictionary of saints and unless your knowledge of French Kings is very good, it’s easy to miss the fact that centuries pass between each of the episodes in the development of her cult.

The saint is first mentioned in passing at the beginning of the second ‘passage’, ‘Saint Hilere’. ‘He has founded a community of brothers no one knows where on the banks of the River Tarn, doubtless on the spot where Enimie, the saint with Merovech’s blood, will later come’ (p. 28).

Enimie's own brief story: 'Enimie', comes next. It reads like a small fable. She is the daughter of the King. She becomes the abbess of a priory ‘on a river called the Tarn, in a place with an unpronounceable name’ (p. 32). It’s a joke. She never goes there. Her position is merely an administrative convenience. She has sex with the major of the palace. He drops her for someone else. She dies. ‘It is said to be leprosy’ (p. 33). 

Three centuries later, the monks of a small community on the Tarn need a saint to substantiate and defend their claim to ownership. The process of creating a posthumous career for Enimie, first writing her vita in Latin, then again much later translating that story into the vernacular, runs over three more stories. The difference between the stories  'Enimie' and 'Sancta Enima' are commentary on the process.

Sancta Enimie is a fake: her posthumous career is created by the shifting needs of the monks and their literary abilities.

If people can suffer in varying degrees from a prodigious desire for something that is absent, then religion is what you get when that desire is given an object. Inherent in that idea is that manipulation and exploitation are inevitable. Those who desire can be manipulated and exploited by those who can supply and claim to control that object. It’s how advertising and propaganda work. It is hardly an earth-shattering observation until it is applied to religion and Medieval faith. Accept the desire; deny the reality of the object of that desire.

And that’s where the modern mind and the medieval one part company.

Christianity has a bad press. Fundamentalists make the headlines.  The deviant behavior of some of its clergy is used to damn the whole of the Catholic Church. Modern knowledge, from Biology to Medicine to Meteorology, can supply convincing explanations of many miracle stories. Atheism is trendy.

Whether or not a modern writer believes in saints and miracles, people in the past did. The question is then how to deal with this belief if writing about the past.

Michon translates those beliefs into a narrative underwritten by modern skepticism.  We know the church as an institution became corrupt. We know its beliefs became easily exploited by the greedy and unscrupulous. There were enough fragments of the true cross in Europe to build a decent house and some of John the Baptist’s many fingers looked a lot like chicken bones.

But that doesn’t mean it was all faked. Bede and his audience expected miracles both from dead saints and living holy men and women. Miracles were the visible, tangible proof of an invisible power or an exceptional grace. When the Pagan priests and the Christian missionaries faced off in post Roman Britain, it wasn’t the equivalent of a conjurors’ Ok Corral. Writing it as though it were is entertaining and comforting to the modern mind, but another conjuror’s trick. 

Tom Pickard's 'Winter Migrants' and 'Fiends Fell'.

Tom Pickard’s Winter Migrants Carcanet (2016) and Fiends Fell (Flood Editions 2017)

 

I wrote the first half of what follows and posted it on Lady Godiva and Me nearly a year ago. I’d been rereading Winter Migrants in a cottage on the North-East Coast of England. The wind coming off the North Sea battered the walls with a vindictive persistence as it tried to rip away the roof.  It wasn’t a review: I wanted to celebrate the book because it was the most enjoyable new poetry I’d read in a long time.

 

1

Winter Migrants

My test of a slim poetry book (78 pages) by a single author is can I live with it for a week? Can I read and then reread and not feel the urge to read anything else. And then if I put it aside and come back to it, does it still hold my attention? Most modern single author collections of poetry fail this test, miserably. 

I bought Winter Migrants as soon as it was published and I’ve been rereading it ever since. In terms of my test it’s an excellent book. 

It’s split into three parts: two sequences: Lark and Merlin, and from Fiends Fell Journal and a third section made up of individual poems.

Pickard’s poetry has almost always been the record of one intelligence moving through time and recording what he encounters in precise language. 

 

a wren

perched on a hawthorn

low enough to skip the scalping winds,

 

sang a scalpel song.    

 

This first poem from Lark and Merlin is a good example of an elegantly spare, stripped-down or stripped back poetic. It belongs to what Donald Davie once celebrated as ‘a poetry of right naming’. The poet works to find the best word to describe the world he lives through. 

When Alice complained to Humpty Dumpty that he was making the words do too much work, Humpty boasted that he paid them extra for their efforts when they turned up for their wages on a Saturday. Presumably there's a small queue at Pickard's every Saturday and they have negotiated for overtime. 

While I was rereading Winter Migrants I was also reading Baker’s The Peregrine. Both books have the same detailed observation of movement and light, landscapes and their wild inhabitants. Ruskin would have approved of both writers’ honest attention to detail. However, while Baker’s prose overloads the reader, Pickard’s poems have the advantage that everything unnecessary has been left out. What I envy most is his ability to capture the effects wind has and describe its movement over a landscape. In this he’s as good if not better than Ruskin at his best; he also has the added advantage of brevity. 

Sometimes minimalism doesn’t leave much for the reader to do except admire the poet’s skill. The Sequence solves this problem. Lark and Merlin might be a record of a relationship. There’s a she/you and an I. But the subject is absent. There’s no biographical context (factual or fictional) to distract from the poems. And I don’t understand how this works, but the absence of the subject creates the space which holds the sequence together. 

It also allows for the complexities of shifting power within a relationship, the confusion as well as the celebrations:

 

She asked about my heart,
Its evasive flight;
but can I trust her with its secrets? 

and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey,
tell the fleeing lark it is enamoured of its song? 

or the singing lark turn tail
and fly into the falcon’s talons? 

The final section of the book contains an assortment of poems on a range of subjects and in a range of styles, from the satire of ‘Whining while dining oot’ which puts the boot into a certain type of regional poet, to lamenting a death, ‘Squire’; to expressions of frustration with his contemporaries; the marvelously quotable, ‘To Goad My Friggin Peers’. 

At the end the book returns to the sparser tone of its beginning with ‘At the Estuary’ and ‘Winter Migrants’, both short sequences.

And as a PS. As someone who has often grumbled about the absurdity of blurbs on poetry books, the paragraph on the back of Winter Migrants is a model of how a poetry book could be described.

2

 Fiends Fell

Winter Migrants contains extracts from Fiends Fell Journal, a mix of prose with poetry.

A year later (2017) and Fiends Fell has been published by Flood Editions. The blurb says it charts a single year out of a decade spent ‘on a bare hilltop near the English-Scottish border’.  It contains ‘Fiends’ Fell Journal’ and ‘Lark and Merlin’.

Journals are dodgy things. The journals of poets have to compete with Coleridge’s and that’s a non-starter. The range of possible reasons for reader disappointment is vast. You are being invited to stare over the author’s shoulder and share his or her navel gazing. There is an explicit invitation to voyeurism and your willful indulgence in it might not be healthy or edifying.

The temptation to be ‘poetic’ or ‘profound’, to claim thoughts that one never had or to edit for effect must be immense.

So I hesitated because there was also the specific fear that the journal would turn out to be a prose exposition of Lark and Merlin which would bury the poems in the details that had been originally left out.

Should have known better by now. The postman delivered it early in the day. I had plans. There were things I had to do, and I thought, I haven’t got time for this. But I want to read a bit. Just a few pages. And many hours later I’d finished it and all the other things I had planned to do were still waiting to be done.

The Journal is the record of an intelligence moving through a landscape and taking careful note of everything seen, felt and heard. It’s also, incidentally and occasionally, about the writing of The Ballad of Jamie Allan. For those of us who like that book there’s the added bonus of a short run of 6 pieces about Nell Clarke, one of Allen’s partners, which doesn’t show up in The Ballad of Jamie Allen.

It might sound like a strange compliment, but it’s honest poetry and prose which doesn’t fudge itself by pretending to ‘poetic thoughts’ or attempting to be ‘literary’.  In the wrong hands, the prose could easily become poetic pose in the worst sense of ‘poetic’: The solitary wind whipped figure served up as metaphor for the modern poet facing society’s overwhelming indifference. But one of the reasons for reading Pickard is the well-founded faith that he isn’t going to do that. 

The blurb, which is another good example of how to write a blurb, describes it as a Haibun, but the alternation of Prose and Verse you find in medieval Welsh and Irish texts feels like a comparison more appropriate to the wild landscape. The obvious comparison is with Basho, who is nodded to in the text, but Basho was never this angry, physical or funny.

There are the inevitable traces of autobiography, but in an honest journal the writer is talking not to the reader but to himself, so here there is no explanation or background, just memories and interactions picked up and passed over. The gaps in Lark and Merlin are not filled in. Rather than an invitation to voyeurism, there’s an invitation to share a walk.

The background to ‘Whining while dining oot’ is provided, but the information doesn’t detract from the poem, and, perhaps ironically for those academically inclined to believe context is everything, it doesn’t add anything either.

As in Winter Migrants, the wind and weather become characters in the narrative. Pickard records his share of memories, meetings and dealings with humans, birds rats and mice, but the weather is his significant other in this book. It keeps him indoors, threatens him at night, bullies him when he’s outside, and just occasionally leaves him alone.

There’s been a lot of nonsense written recently surrounding the financial success of Milk and Honey and the ‘renaissance of poetry’ in Britain. There’s an unforgivable ignorance in some of the commentators who seem to think poetry of direct statement was invented on Instagram. Pickard, and others like him, have been plying their trade for decades, mostly unnoticed by the press, who would rather promote the self-centred whining of the wilfully ignorant for no other reason than the success of their sales pitch and the size of their royalties.

Nothing I’ve just written does justice to the pleasure of reading Winter Migrants or Fiends Fell. Which is really what makes Pickard stand out. He’s very good, but he’s also entertaining and thought provoking, and enjoyable. 

He reminds me what poetry was probably like before it was turned into a ‘pedant’s game’ or the chopped prose equivalent of a selfie: worth rereading. 

 

 

 

Josephine Balmer's 'The Paths of Survival'.

I’ve been rereading, ‘The Paths of Survival’ since it arrived. It is such an enjoyable, thought-provoking book.  It also looks good. Cover design and blurb are exemplary.  

 A book length sequence of poems, each poem identified in place and time. The sequence begins with one of the the book’s few anonymous speakers, standing in front of a glass case in a museum, looking at a fragment of Aeschylus’ lost play Myrmidons, a scandalous piece of work which celebrated Achilles’ love for Patroclus. The sequence then moves backwards through an imagined history of the text as the editors, translators, copyists, book lovers and Aeschylus himself speak, stepping out of the shadows at the point where the text intersects with their lives.

It’s an impressive feat of imaginative reconstruction, this bringing to life a fragment of text. The voices lead back to a heavily footnoted reconstruction of what little survives of the play.  At the back of the book, ‘Historical Notes and Sources’ provide a short note on each poem, identifying speakers and contexts. Between the play and the notes a final quote…I have been silent too long. The play is not the end, or beginning of the sequence, the play gave shape to something that existed before it.

I have to admit that part of my enthusiasm for this book is that it’s about books and language and I recognize myself in the situation of the first speaker.

Still I am drawn to it like breath to glass.
That ache of absence, wrench of nothingness,
Stark lacunae we all must someday face.

I imagine its letters freshly seared
A scribe sighing over the ebbing tape

                        (Proem: Final Sentence.p.11))

In my case I was standing in front of the Exeter Book, one of only four books containing Old English poetry to survive from 6 centuries of Anglo-Saxon England.  I was in the cathedral library, with the librarian hovering nervously in case I broke the glass, tucked the book under my arm and had me an escape out the windows.

It’s impossible not to imagine the scribe who wrote it, or the incidents and accidents of its history that lead to its survival, when so much else has perished.

Those vague thoughts are brought into focus by Balmer’s poems. They give human form to somethings as abstract as the love of books that allowed for their careful transmission and survival, for the lovers of words who scrawled a favorite line or two on the back of other documents, and for the hatred of ideas that lead to their burning, as well as the casual destruction in which they were ‘collateral damage’.

Each speaker participates in the chain of accidents, sometimes unaware of the significance of their actions.  Librarians, antiquarians and book lovers have their obvious reasons, but lovers who find in the fragments words to inspire them, scholars who are horrified by the content, people who hate ideas, paid copyists bored, hurrying so he can get to the brothel, and the flight crew of the 2nd world war bomber, one of the most anonymous of the voices, that records ‘Targets; both destroyed. Stray objects hit; one’ all participated.  

One strand running through the voices is an absolute belief in the value of the written word.  

                              Books are

The twisted paths of our past.
This is who we were and what we are.

(The Pagan’s Tip p. 43)

No books and we are condemned to memory and the immediacy of a physically present speaker.  In ‘The Librarian’s Power’ subtitled (The National Library, Baghdad, 2003) with its stark opening line,  ‘We carried what we could to safety’ the librarians have to cajole the locals into letting them use ‘their one precious generator’. Asked why they are struggling to save books when so many people were dying, they replied:

We could only say that, if not flesh,
here were dividing cells, bare blocks,
of collective memory. Conscience.

The vast record of all our knowledge
and of our faith. An ancient Quran,
the House of Wisdom we had built;
the learning we alone had salvaged
and then protected for the Greeks--.

Culture and civilisation are fragile. Culture is not an abstraction, some rough beast that slouched out of the Fairy Queen to lock us in the prison house of language. Culture is the sum total of people and their actions and Balmer’s voices give testimony to this. History includes the casual destruction of texts and people, and the knowledge that intolerance and stupidity are not new inventions:

We’ll storm their prized libraries
strip the dwindling shelves bare.
Who needs poetry or philosophy
When you have faith and orthodoxy

(The Christians’ Cheek. P.42)

Survival requires human agency. And often a bloody-minded refusal to accept defeat. After describing the sack of Constantinople, the clerk ends his witness:

                                    Let them mock.

Where they had cruelty, we had culture.
Where they had greed, we had Greek.

(The Clerk’s Crusade. P.32)

There is a different greed though, and one that is celebrated here, the greed for knowing which is a form of lust.

Back home. I caressed my acquisitions,
tenderly; afraid their soft skin might tear.
I had no lovers. I knew no passion
Except for this, for words. My life’s breath. Air.

            (Hoard. p. 30)

 

I’ve quoted so much to show the voices. The blurb calls them dramatic monologues, but that sounds too formal and substantial. They are more like fragments of speeches from an unwritten or lost play.

Balmer’s craft is enjoyably subtle; the variations between poems are small but significant.  An unobtrusive rhyme scheme varying and sometimes absent, sometimes a barely noticeable patterning of sounds. There’s nothing pyrotechnic to obstruct the speaking voice.

The intelligence lies in the architecture and the control, which is where I think it always should be.  The speakers are arranged in groups, each group described by a line or phrase from the play. Each group providing a comment on the line as the line comments on them. The sequence is organized by the text it responds to.

If the subject sounds esoteric: “the survival of a fragment of a play by some dead Greek Dude’ the poems aren’t.  The individual speakers are too interesting in themselves. And it’s a thought provoking book. It’s a rare modern example of the suitably classical Horace’s belief that poetry should ‘Delight and Instruct’.  Read it for the pleasure of the voices and learn along the way.  

You could give ‘The Paths of survival’ to any intelligent reader, to someone who doesn’t normally bother with poetry, and they would enjoy it. Then the next time they buy a Penguin Classic, or one of the Oxford World’s Classics, they might stop and wonder how Herodotus or Sophocles made it to paperback.

 

Colin Simms 'Goshawk Poems'

I’d never read anything by Colin Simms before which just goes to show that there are so many fine poets at work and I've never heard of them. A book of poems about Goshawks might not sound interesting, and it could have been disastrous, but this is a fine example of Donald Davie’s ‘poetry of right naming’, recording decades of close observation. It reminds me of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Ruskin with his notebook and pencil, trying to capture the sea or light on water or clouds. It’s one of the highest compliments I can pay a book.

At first the exuberant abundance is overwhelming: 150 pages of poems, often with two or three to a page. But once over being intimidated the book rewards repeated reading.

I don’t like poetry books that don’t need readers: this one does. It wants its Model Reader to pay attention, to look carefully, and then keep looking as the poems turn the subject in different lights, different settings.  The poems want the reader to share their fascination and to realize how paying this kind of attention is rewarded not with repetition but endless variation.  Perhaps the great achievement here it that for all the decades of attention Simms pays to them, the Goshawks never become domesticated or humanised,  are never translated into some comfortably symbolic figure. They remain beautifully, fascinatingly other.

The best poetry sometimes sounds familiar. There’s echoes of Ivor Gurney, Hopkins, Bunting, (Bunting and MacDairmid make fleeting appearances in the poems) but while there’s a sense of continuity and tradition, this is not to suggest that these poems are  just a combination of those poets, or other ones other readers might hear. Beyond the familiar echoes is something unique unto itself.

Many of the poems have the provisional feel of a rapid sketch, the language hurrying to catch the movement of the hawk across field, the scatterings of prey, the omnipresent weather, and the way it alters light and activity:

Wind lifts beech leaves progressively in a pattern of little waves
a tide towards the wood’s enclosing slopes, heaping-up this November
Alan and I looked vainly for woodcoks’s through. Under the timber
wings blow a path parting the same leaves in lesser musical staves
even the wings of Bramblings. (p.64)

 ‘Provisional’ is not a way of suggesting the poems are badly made or unfinished. Speak the lines aloud, listen to the way the verse moves. This is not accidental. It is enviable.

My only problem with this book is that there seems to be many other books by Simms I now have to read.  An economic problem,  but something I look forward to solving.