Aubrey Beardsley, illustration for The Rape of the Lock (photo credit: wikiart)
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was my first encounter zeugma. Blink and you miss it. Belinda, our flaky heroine, applies war-paint for a ball at Hampton Court, as black omens of dire disaster threaten to ‘stain her honour, or her new brocade’ and perhaps she will ‘lose her heart, or necklace.’ In his 1692 ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire,’ John Dryden writes, ‘How easie is it to call Rogue and Villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a Man appear a Fool, a Blockhead, or a Knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms!… there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place.’ If Pope’s Belinda is a thinly veiled portrait of Arabella Fermor, then perhaps she would have smiled at Pope’s narcotic mix of perfumes, unguents and heaving beauty. However, Pope handles light and shade like a water-colourist. At best, his zeugma trivializes the young beauty and, at worst, points to a grotesque level of self-absorption.
Schröedinger’s cat (photo credit: Wikipedia)
INSTANT-fLEX 718 delivers similar pleasures and showcases Heather Phillipson as mistress of the biting one-liner. In ‘Actually, I’m Simply Trying to Find My Dressing Gown Sash’ we read that ‘Only runners / should be up at this hour, running for their lives.’ With her deft stroke, Phillipson defamiliarises the day-to-day, inverting it into something dark with mortality snapping at its heels. Nothing is taken for granted in Phillipson’s universe, a universe which feels informed more by Schrödinger’s cat than the good old Newtonian universe we kid ourselves we can take for granted: ‘Matter can’t vanish. But, having checked my waist / (coffee percolator, compost heap, plug hole, deep freeze, U-bend, / consulted the moth with a philosopher’s expression on the door mat / (dead)), what’s left in this place to frisk or rely on. // Best to walk off in a straight line towards a recollection / of the bird feeder.’
Phillipson’s warped suburbia brings to mind Luke Samuel Yate’s 2013 pamphlet, The pair of scissors that could cut anything. ‘The Baby [hereafter referred to as ‘The Baby’] hereby contracts with The Mother [hereafter referred to as ‘The Mother’] -‘ finishes with the horrifically ambiguous ‘the Baby doesn’t wonder when / The Mother will stop thinking of her, The Baby, as The Baby.’ At least with Pope the direction of the thrust was clear but Phillipson affords her reader with no such luxury. She leaves her universe in absolute uncertainty.
I’m lucky if I’ve got the milk and nappies to see me through the day and, where I once tried to stem the rising tide of plastic fantastic, I’m now resigned to sit in the surf, knowing that to put a be-socked foot wrong will result in howling pain (the smallest toys are the deadliest). So, I’d rather assumed that poetry magazines were a luxury for the time rich. However, I was recently sent a copy of Butcher’s Dog and it has changed my mind. Butcher’s Dog is biannual and was founded in the North East of England. The magazine carries work written across the UK but has a special interest in work from poets based in the North.
Butcher’s Dog logo
Issue 4 is edited by Sophie F Baker,Will Barrett and The Poetry School Co-editors. The Editor’s Note asserts that the poems are ‘delightfully eclectic in length and style, form and freedom, subject matter and voice. There are poems of great sadness and poems of joyful, tail-wagging exuberance; of lust and longing, and of satisfied companionship.’ This is no grand claim: I have been living with the poems in this issue, on and off, for a couple of months now and they have made excellent companions.
Land Rail, Thomas Bewick (photo credit: Wikipedia)
I live in suburbia, not the Hebrides, yet Seth Crook‘s Imitation still resonates (although, on this estate, it’s car alarms we’re treated to): ‘The corncrake is here. 3 am. / It will stop calling // for about thirty seconds // but it will start again, / serious about / this mating business.’ The poem’s taut lines, often amounting to no more than a word, agonisingly and intermittently disrupt the page’s placid whiteness. The emphatic certainty of Crook’s ‘will‘ is implacable and, faced with this natural onslaught, what chance do we stand? Sooner or later, at least the neighbours will start screaming and hammering. The car alarm will be switched off. However, Crook’s poem had me laughing out loud as, ‘Inside, / it is so tempting to wake her up / with your corncrake. // So / tempting.’ ‘Inside’ deftly illustrates the degree to which we are insulated from the natural world, even on the Hebrides. Yet, even today, nature finds a way to impose its rhythms on us and we’re not as unlike the humble corncrake as we like to think we are. Stuart Pickford‘s My Life in Contraceptives rings no less true but reaches different conclusions and his stanza break hints at decades of bored, mechanistic intercourse, as he writes of, ‘Those sweet days of sin before kids. // Now, an economy pack with the shopping.’
The Blinded Samson, Lovis Corinth, 1912 (photo credit: Wikipedia)
On the facing page, in John Wedgwood Clarke‘s Barber, balding middle age is treated rather differently. ‘He couldn’t bear to look at himself in the mirror. / The clippers buzzed behind his ear. / The barber’s fingers firmly swivelled his head, / pushed it forward, forcing him to bow.’ In this context, ‘bear’ suggests self-disgust but it also suggests a weight, a burden – faced with the mirror, the customer has lowered his own head. On a first reading, the poem appears to be about the indignity of being manhandled: ‘now he took it // personally when the barber tried to dip / his head.’ However, in stanza one, the barber has forced the customer to bow to a reflection he is too disgusted to face, suggesting that the real indignity is a kind of coerced blasphemy. Clarke’s poem is suggestive and resonant: the unwelcome cutting of hair takes me straight to the Book of Judges and I’m left wondering how this dark story ends.
It’s hard not to love this magazine. You can enjoy the beauty of nature and language in Jane Burn‘s Froghopper, or take a walk in the company of Helen Mort and Tony Harrison in Kay Buckley’s excellent Opus Anglicanum. My wife has been asking me what I’d like for Christmas for ages. A subscription to Butcher’s Dog is the only thing on my list.
Domenico Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Magi, 1485 – 88 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lisa Jardine’s excellent Worldly Goods challenges the view that galleries are secular temples, and that we should approach the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, with a reverential hush. Not according to Jardine. She writes that, in the Renaissance, ‘Clients commissioning important and ostentatiously expensive works would stipulate particularly high-grade ultramarine in their contract with the chosen painter.’ So, when Domenico Ghirlandaio was commissioned to paint an Adoration of the Magi by the Prior of the Spedale degli Innocenti, the contract read: ‘He must colour the panel at his own expense with good colours and with powdered gold on such ornaments as demand it […] and the blue must be ultramarine of the value about four florins the ounce.’ Viewed like this, Renaissance paintings begin to look like gold plated iPhones, or iced out bling bling watches. It’s heartwarming. Those Renaissance faces flush with warmth once more and the brash lapis skies and robes remind us that twenty-first century materialism is merely the current iteration of a timeless magpie spirit.
Sigiriya, Lion Gate (Photo credit: Cherubino)
Ravinthiran’s poem, Sigiriya, takes as its source material the Sri Lankan UNESCO World Heritage Site, believed to have been constructed in the 5th century CE. ‘Others had the same idea before me; / or something like it anyway. Old men / with limbs like burnt match-sticks, / ungrateful offspring; women / who broke the rules or had them broken / on their behalf. The leprous and deformed; / the sage; eloping lovers; criminals; / anyone who would live off the grid.’ Ravinthiran’s conflation of stories of elopement and escape makes Sigiriya feel like Ur, the point of origin, a rock large enough to have its own gravity. Ravinthiran’s language forces this world into collision with twenty-first century narratives, as living ‘off the grid’ evokes Robert Ludlum‘s Jason Bourne. At first, the reader might presume that these cultural references reveal modernity’s ephemeral worthlessness. Compared with the timelessness of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, who’s Jason Bourne? Similarly, Sigiriya’s mirror wall, now the stuff of legend, is presented in an uneasy relationship with modernity’s Sharpies and SMSs, and perhaps we detect WB Yeats’ scathing attack on the popular culture of his own time between the lines: ‘the mirror wall – its egg-white glaze / is now grey chalk reflecting only heat – / with felt-tipped love-hearts / and western txtspeak.’ The fragility and beauty of Sigirya’s legendary mirror wall sits uneasily alongside mindless graffiti and the eviscerated language of the SMS. Yet Ravinthiran invokes Shelley’s Ozymandias, and Sigiriya’s ‘king of kings’ feels ‘no anger / at the urine marking of a weaker ego… / If I lived today, my logo / would blaze on jet and skyscraper.’ It’s hard not to warm to the speaker’s whole-hearted acceptance of modernity and challenge to our instinct to preserve the past in formaldehyde.
Video games offer immersive worlds and Bethesda’s Fallout 3 is a fine example. I’m not an outdoors type and can name no more than a handful of plants and birds. This alienation from nature means that some poets and especially some of the Romantics, leave me cold. Wordsworth’s blithe throstle is all a bit much when your childhood was spent trading through Elite‘s galaxies on a Commodore 64. However, in a sense, I’ve spent years outdoors, watching the sun rising through the LA’s sublime particle physics in Grand Theft Auto V.
Ravinthiran’s sonnet, Fallout 3, is set in the Wasteland, a post apocalyptic Washington and, in his hands, it reveals its own sublimity: ‘rubble scaled by the moonlight and me / somewhere near Rockbreaker’s Last Stand / watching a tin-can frisked by the wind.’ So far, so very Wordsworthian. Then, ‘The texture maps beneath my feet / failed and I shifted to 3rd person view / taking in my jerky skull and shoulders / while minutely grooved and pitted boulders / blurred and softened by that digital flaw / turned all at once to dollops of cake mix / and the unconvincing walking physics / got my stand-in skating in no time / like Wordsworth across what looked to me / like endless moonlit plains of dirty ice.’ The coding underpinning video games is poised on a knife-edge of stability and the venture is so complex that glitches are inevitable. For the player, some bugs are enraging but others break the rules of physics with a hilarity worthy of curation on YouTube. The deceptive solidity and actual fragility of the natural world is lovingly rendered in this poem and the playful collision of antitheses makes Grun-tu-molani a savvy, iconoclastic meditation on culture.
Henry, Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, 1790s (Photo credit: public domain)
Ravinthiran’s range of references to pop culture does not mean that anything goes and, towards the end of the collection, he draws a line in the sand. In ‘The Zany White Poet,’ he writes that the poet ‘trades / wisdom for fizz, so original he sounds / like Noel Fielding, // so liberated / from history / and ideas; // his paid-for technique / a picture of nothing / and very like.’ In Grun-tu-molani, Vidyan Ravinthiran asks this generation to question its legacy and we’re left wondering whether popular culture doesn’t represent the best of us as, historically, it always has. Ravinthiran’s on fine form and these irreverent, observant poems ask awkward questions with charm and wit.
Standing in front of an officer of the law wearing nothing but pants is a sobering experience and, even when innocent, it’s hard not to look guilty, not to feel guilty, when he steps inside and starts searching.
I was woken in the small hours by frenzied banging. Back then I lived on a narrowboat and its flimsy wooden door rattled like a greenhouse. I cowered in bed before assessing my chances of getting the phone and dialling 999. The banging intensified, and then a voice: ‘Open up! Police!’ Practically naked, I ran to the door, half expecting to feel a knife slide between my ribs but, up the steps and towering above me, there was a policeman, blinding me with a handheld searchlight. I was starting to wake up and realized that the whole towpath was in uproar. More police officers emerged from a van and crossed the footbridge to the other moorings. The whole area was illuminated. It was then that I felt the noise, looked up and saw the helicopter bobbing overhead.
Go Tabs, Weirs Mill Stream, Oxford (Photo credit: John Field)
The officer gave my boat a cursory sweep from lounge to engine room, deducing that I had not kidnapped a baby (and neither, dear reader, had any of my fellow boaties). However, that night the police had subjected me to a disorienting, humiliating, invasive, frightening search. Not once was so much as a scrap of an apology muttered. If a private citizen feels like this on the one occasion when he is arbitrarily targeted by the police, then how does it feel when it’s a routine abuse?
In The Brits, Colette Bryce presents a raid on a house during the Troubles. ‘Whatever it was they were looking for, they liked / to arrive in the small hours, take us by surprise, / avoiding our eyes like gormless youngfellas / shuffling at a dance. My mother spoke: / a nod from the leader and the batch of heavy rifles / was stacked, clackety-clack, like a neat camp fire / under the arch of the hall table.’ Through the impersonal ‘they,’ the poem implies a remote intelligence, the will of which is at odds with the boy scout soldiers, whose embarrassed, shamed lack of eye contact almost allies them with the family. The soldiers’ unimpressiveness is further highlighted by the fact that only the mother speaks, her authority and care undermining the silent ‘leader.’ Bryce’s collection is tightly structured and so, as each soldier’s face is ‘for an instant, hung in the mirror,’ the reader is reminded of Derry, the collection’s second poem: ‘A teacher’s daughter, I was one of nine / faces afloat in the looking-glass.’ The Brits’ appearance in the self-same looking-glass either heightens our awareness of the depth of their intrusion, or reminds us that, on a different day and in a different place, these soldiers might have been gormless first dates – guests. Likewise, ‘Thundered up the stairs’ either evokes divine anger, or a mock-heroic playdate. The poem’s single stanza break jump cuts to the present, inviting the reader to anticipate some moralizing about the scars of the past and other assorted clichés. Instead, Bryce gives us: ‘Last night I dreamt of tiny soldiers, / like the action figures I played with as a child. / Fay Wray soldiers in the clumsy hands of Kong, / little Hasbro troopers in the massive hands of God.’ At first, they’re not toy soldiers, they are just tiny soldiers, recast as utterly human but utterly helpless. Then they change sex, becoming Fay Wray: a sacrifice to something implacable and savage (or perhaps just plain misunderstood in a scenario in which both are victims). And as for those little Hasbro troopers – their frail limbs are a clear invitation to the childish mind: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport’ – all this handled with levity and a truthful attention to detail which lets the bigger picture speak for itself without recourse to the soapbox.
Nottingham MMB 49 Forest Rec Ground (Photo credit: matt buck)
Helicopters is composed of miniature couplets, stacked up to create height and fragility: ‘Over time, you picture them / after dark, in searches // focusing on streets and houses / close above the churches // or balancing / on narrow wands of light. // And find so much depends upon / the way you choose // to look at them: / high in the night // their minor flares confused / among the stars, there // almost beautiful.’ Bryce’s stanzas, some of them comprising no more than a few words, suggest the restless, fitful sweep of the searchlight, finding an image of arresting beauty in ‘narrow wands of light’ – the sort of excitement watching children might feel despite themselves. As the helicopter’s lights hang in the heavens, we would be forgiven for endowing them with the gravity, of the stars but any similarity to the celestial bodies is coincidental, reminding us of our place in the big picture.
Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Pattersson 1959 (Photo credit: public domain)
The Whole & Rain-domed Universe is about much more than the Troubles – but they form the backdrop against which a family understands itself and memory enriches as time advances. That mother, for example, so strong in The Brits, is revisited in Mammy Dozes: ‘Eighty years have leant her skin // a bruised look in composure, / a touch of purples / to the hollows, so Mammy dozing / resembles a boxer in defeat.’ When read against the portrait of the mother in The Brits, Bryce co-opts her readers’ memories – we become her – and our grasp of the significance of this dropping of the chin delivers a powerful left hook as we see it feelingly.
Valley Afghanistan 2002 (Photo credit: Paul Seawright – used with permission)
The infantryman’s spade is a symbol of his relationship with the earth. Our eyes are drawn to the assault rifle but he spends more time digging than he does fighting. However, once the conflict’s rolled away, the earth, once life-preserving, changes character. On August 15th, 1998, the Irish Times’ Padraic Convery, reporting on unexploded ordnance in Laos, wrote that: ‘In one village an entire family was wiped out. The young mother and her four children, aged between two and eight, were all killed by a single unexploded bomb while clearing grass in a field. Only six months earlier her husband had died after striking a bombe [bomblet] with his hoe in the same field. Another farmer died the same way in a field he had worked for the previous two years.’ During the Vietnam war, the US airforce flew a mission over Laos every 8 minutes for 9 years – leaving Laos with the distinction of being the country most contaminated with unexploded ordnance. The Mines Advisory Group operation there has a budget of $1 million a year. The bombardment cost US taxpayers more than $2 million a day over its nine years. Casting our eyes deeper into C20th history, of the 23 million assorted explosives fired over Verdun in 1916, it’s estimated that 4.5 million of them failed to detonate and a deadly crop of hundreds of tons of volatile unexploded ordnance wriggle into the light every year, as farmers plough their fields and the weather freezes and thaws the earth.
Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting opens with Customs and we’re left wondering whether Powers is referring to the reflexes and muscle memory of the infantryman, now transposed to a civilian environment, or whether he’s got baggage to declare as he crosses the checkpoint between war and peace. Everything has changed and words now mean their opposites, as ‘Amen may have meant “to begin” / back then. So be it, the desert, I imagine, / said. So be it, as the car I’m traveling in / turns right on state highway 71, / due west into the vast unending waste / of Texas. // Now it only lets us know that things are at an end.’ The speaker’s ‘may’, open to possibilities, characterises him as thoughtful, introspective and line break before ‘of Texas’ shows a flash of a wicked humour.
NZ Army Cpl. Conrad Wall holds his Steyr AUG assault rifle, June 13, 2013, Camp Pendleton, California (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. James Gulliver/Released)
The collection’s title poem follows, and we get an idea of what the change in values calmly proposed in Customs might actually mean. ‘I tell her I love her like not killing / or ten minutes of sleep / beneath the low rooftop wall / on which my rifle rests.’ That the best the speaker can manage is to define love as like the absence of a thing shows how inverted his values have become. The stanza finishes in dark, ironic mood as, while the fitful infantryman tries to snatch ‘ten minutes of sleep,’ his ‘rifle rests’ and, if any smell’s associated with love letters, it would be perfume – but this is ‘a letter that will stink, / when she opens it, / of bolt oil and burned powder / and the things it says.’
Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1917 (The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive: public domain)
Independence Day is in dialogue with Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth. Owen’s ‘passing-bells’ echo in Powers’: ‘Sunset: the shadow of the carillon / had done its covering of us.’ Unlike the knell of Owen’s bell, ‘carillon’ implies something light and melodic, yet even this casts a shadow and ‘covering’ has military connotations. Powers develops this idea in the next stanza: ‘And the ringing I / did not hear next did not come from the building’s bells, / but from the sound / of each ignited shell / that boxed my ears with its beginning.’ Signs and signifiers are decoupled and, as Powers recycles Owens’ bells / shells rhyme, he compels the reader to transpose the scale and horror of World War One onto his poem. Yet the report of each shell ‘boxed my ears,’ undercutting Owen’s image with something familiar, schoolboyish, fatherly even (all this while the girl he finally achieves ‘resonance’ with is identified as no more than ‘the girl’). To cope, all the speaker can do is ‘dig / my feet into the ground as hard as I / could if I / ever doubted / the firmness of reality’… ‘in fact I / have tried to become earth / many times, to be lower than earth.’
U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Richard Mikesell digs a foxhole at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, Calif., Sept. 16, 2011 (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Reece Lodder/Released)
The holistic view of the soldier presented in Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting’s dramatizes the barely repressed trauma of combat, imagining his world as a place in which sounds and sights, together with the words used to name them, have drifted away from the soldier’s organising intelligence. In Portugal, the speaker says ‘When I turn // to my mother’s grave, a hole in the dirt / beneath cork oak and wheat, I am afraid // because the edge of a peninsula is a great mass / of earth – so much to put my mother in, / so much with which to cover her.’ The earth, the soldier’s refuge, the keeper of his secrets, will betray him in time, as farmers plough their fields, or as the weather freezes and thaws the earth.
Antony Gormley, Angel of the North, 1998 (Photocredit: Wikipedia)
Gormley’s Angel of the North feels like a guardian. Angels were not always sanitized cuties, flitting about on Tinkerbell wings. Exodus offers instead an Angel of Death and the Archangel Michael sits atop Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, as legend has it that he sheathed his sword there to signal the end of the 590 plague. More recently, David Almond’s novel, Skellig, presents a blackened, emaciated excuse for an angel whose return to health keeps pace with that of a critically ill young girl. I chatted Skellig over after its 1999 publication with a guy who knew Almond at school. His sense was that the Angel of the North, completed the year before, resonated through the novel and that Skellig’s arthritic limbs and Gormley’s steel taking flight spoke of the regeneration of the industrial North East.
Liz Berry’s Black Country is a thing of wonder and her poems, winking in the light of her mother’s silver stilettos, are beaten to an airy thinness. The collection is satisfyingly cohesive and its opening poem, Bird, sets the tone. Free verse flies across the page as Berry stages a metamorphosis: ‘I spread my flight-greedy arms / to watch my fingers jewelling like ten hummingbirds, / my feet callousing to knuckly claws. / As my lips calcified to a hooked kiss / silence / then an exultation of larks filled the clouds / and, in my mother’s voice, chorused: / Tek flight , chick, goo far fer the winter.’ The poem’s euphoric and unrestrained, the ‘flight-greedy arms’ conjuring uncontrollable indulgence. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses petrification is often a punishment but, in Berry’s hands, ‘Jewels’ and ‘calcified’ evoke something flashy and substantial, a journey into womanhood, a future full of promise.
Vilhelm Pedersen, illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The forking paths of the journey offer divergent outcomes and, in The Red Shoes, the shoes feel like a good fit: ‘Crimson. Like flames, like the first sear of blood / that came in the night and daubed a heart on my bedsheets. / They made blushes look pale.’ That crimson, like the first sear of blood, would have us believe that they’re a rite of passage and there’s little to distinguish their jewelled pleasures from those in Bird: ‘On Saturdays, I pressed my lips to the steamy glass / of the shoe-shop window and blew them / a kiss. I was mad for their patent, // rubies that glistened up a dress, / flushed thighs with fever.’ Berry’s lines ooze sexual excitement and the tercets suggest a dance measure but the mood darkens ‘through the waste ground / to the filthy canal’ and ‘I heard the screams of girls who had danced // before me, their ankles severed, /toes / still tapping, white as wounded doves.’ Later in the collection, we read ‘My Mother’s Wedding Shoes.’ The couplets suggest togetherness as ‘I try on your silver stilettos; ones you bought / before I was born, to wear at a wedding perhaps.’ ‘As a girl I longed to be fairytaled by shoes like these / while you kept me in lace-ups, classroom brogues / you’d polish each Sunday so your face shone back. / Now I understand what those plain soles meant: // Walk away, mah wench, from this town, that wedding. / Tek yer books an’ yer sense an’ keep on walking.’ Perhaps this is why Berry’s couplets aren’t quite couplets, why they don’t rhyme — like Heaney’s Clearances 4, or Harrison’s The School of Eloquence — aspiration pushes the chick off the ledge.
Nail maker’s anvil (Photo credit: Andy Mabbett)
Nailmaking offers a different vision of the future – a dark transformation, as the poem’s appraising voice presents woman as little more than an extension of the hammer she swings: ‘The nimble ones was best, / grew sharp and quick as the nails they struck / from the scorching fire.’ ‘Nimble ones’ effaces the workers’ humanity as they grow as sharp as nails and, with ‘tongue skimming the soot on er lips,’ the girl consumes her job as it consumes her.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of this superb collection, this hymn to the West Midlands and act of love. Berry’s poems, even in their darker moments, are lifted by simple pragmatism and the idealism of youth. Put aside The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and ‘Come wi’ me, ban, sum to Tipton-on-Cut, / the real Little Venice, reisty and wild as the midden in August.’
The Empire State Building (Photo credit: Jackpollock)
Last summer was filled with the poetry of Terrance Hayes and notably with his Friday: Poem. Like the outrageous conceits of Donne’s The Flea, it’s hard not to fall in love with Hayes’ fabulous erection: ‘There is no escaping / Spring’s drug. A young man will take the escalator / to the scalp of a ten-story building / lured by petals of a skirt, the scent of wonder.’ When language pushes the limits of priapic desire you’re buoyed by its wellspring. Seidel’s New York also oozes desire but he cuts it with a compelling political and moral urgency.
Do Not Resuscitate’s title evokes geriatric care and the moral nightmare surrounding assisted dying. The poem’s imagery’s lifted from classic horror movies, as ‘The mummy in the case is coming back to life. / It sits up slowly. I can’t bear it.’ There’s a Gothic quality to this: something buried wants to come back – a secret demands to be told. Whatever it is, Seidel’s ‘it’ makes us hesitate to see it as human. Surely it’s a monster, or Shelley’s creature? Then, with grotesque comic timing, the speaker unleashes the force of his misogyny: ‘The guard pays no attention. He knows it is my wife.’ Yet, like Donne’s To His Mistress Going To Bed, where, in the final line, the speaker’s coup de théâtre reveals that he’s already naked, Seidel too ups the ante as the speaker’s health has fared no better: ‘I get up from my bed, woozily embalmed, and it’s / Another gorgeous New York day to try to live. / I loved my wife to bits in fits. I loved her tits. / Her bandaged mummy mouth had nothing else to give.’ Young bucks like Byron and Baudelaire give us youthful, engorged ennui but Frederick Seidel gives us the poems these bad boys might have written as septuagenarians. Perfect rhymes like it’s/tits highlight the crude immaturity, the base simplicity of male desire. In the final stanza, the perspective shifts again and a new speaker comments upon the activities of the aged Lothario: ‘The man can’t stay awake. He wakes and sleeps. / It’s either age or it’s his medications,’ and now the phrase ‘woozily embalmed’ has more pitiful, less Bohemian connotations. ‘He’s giving me the creeps’ turns the poem’s opening conceit upon the poet himself. Are we listening to the ramblings of a dementia sufferer or, more tragically, to the words of someone who just cannot reconcile who he is with who he was?
US President Barack Obama taking his Oath of Office – 2009 Jan 20 (Photo credit: MSgt Cecilio Ricardo)
Arabia offers a thrilling reboot of To His Mistress Going to Bed. Donne, however, was a virile young man, whereas Seidel’s speaker describes the ‘Sex tropics as a way not to be dead. / I don’t know who we are except in bed.’ Sex becomes more than an expression of love but also a staving-off of dementia. In Seidel’s new-found-land, the President is caught between the tectonic plates of the Republican and Democratic parties and he riffs on this rift, on this ‘Mine of precious stones’: ‘O sweet tectonic fault line and sweet lips / Exuding honey that the cowboy sips.’ This yonic imagery casts Obama as Earth Mother and unites him with the American landscape with audacity and humour: ‘America keeps waiting to begin. / It’s sunrise dripping from my chin. / It looks like spring out there on Broadway meant / Barack Obama to be president.’
Osama Bin Laden marked deceased on FBI Ten Most Wanted List May 3 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Victory Parade uses ‘A waxed-to-neatness center strip of quim’ as its conceit – as a symbol for the American state. The values of the speaker, casually misogynistic, imply that anything other than a waxed center strip is unkempt, as if there was anything clean about the tyranny of porno aesthetics. ‘It’s enough to distract / From the other drastic act / Of display today – Osama bin Laden is dead! / One shot to the chest and one to the head, // SEAL Team 6 far away from my bed / Above Broadway – in Abbottabad, Pakistan, instead. / Bullets beyond compare / Flew over there.’ Seidel’s couplets resonate with childish glee as summary execution morphs into Broadway musical. Indeed, the footage of the revellers in Times Square demonstrates yet again that everything’s light entertainment and that a bullet in the head’s just a different kind of money shot.
The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Façades do not present us at our best, no matter how carefully coiffured, or disarmingly déclassé. Take Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre: as a Carolean redux of Rome’s Theatre of Marcellus, it’s imperial – self-consciously theatrical. Knowing that its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, employed an ingenious system of self-supporting beams to achieve a flat ceiling hardly helps, as walking beneath such architectural exploits leaves me feeling childish and trivial – if we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, it’s probably just to get our ball off the roof but, in 2004, restoration work on the Sheldonian revealed a pair of Victorian trousers and this letter, written by Frank Morrill:
Sheldonian Theatre
March 6 1901
Dear Friend –
When you have inspected these trousers please hand them over to the Curator of the Taylor Buildings for the Museum as they were worn by Frank Morrill Chief Assistant to John C Nairn and Son who restored the ceiling of the building.
Hope you will enjoy yourself when you have found this valuable treasure. I expect I will have fed the worms by that time, however I will have a good time before I do so.
Good bye old chap good bye
Yours in ashes (?)
Frank Morrill
Of course our forbears weren’t as buttoned up as the official record suggests, and Morrill’s letter – and trousers – breathe life back into history’s humanity.
Penny Boxall’s ‘The Old Magic’ at Head Over Heels, a display of hats and shoes (Photo credit: johnfield1)
In The Old Magic, the speaker comments: ‘They’ve crept into the walls: oddments / placed by hand for some misplaced / and misremembered purpose. You’re never far – / knock the chimney breast and feel / how it knocks back. / Curled like a leather dog, / this shoe has heard three muffled centuries, / learning its language second-hand.’ That these oddments have ‘crept’ invites the reader to see them as alive, animated in a Sorcerer’s Apprentice sort of way. However, line two would have them ‘placed by hand’ for a purpose which is, like the oddments, also misplaced.’ There’s an all too human truth about the speed with which a deliberate act can be forgotten, as the line opens with the purposeful ‘placed’ but, in the space of a single line, we finish with the word ‘misplaced,’ a truth acknowledged by everyone who’s lost a set of keys. It’s a warm, reciprocal opening, as the ‘breast’ in ‘chimney breast’ adds a living warmth to the building and, as the speaker knocks in line four, the chimney breast knocks back in line five. The poem remind’s me of Paul Muldoon’s The Loaf: ‘When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a / dimmer / switch / in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair / it seems I’ve scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch.’ The shoe, ‘Curled like a leather dog,’ is a faithful servant waiting for its master’s return but, like Frank Morrill, s/he will have fed the worms by that time.
Medieval Shoes, Head Over Heels, a display of hats and shoes (Photo credit: johnfield1)
Despite the collection’s curation as an exhibition of objects, it refuses to dwell in the past, or to smell of museums. Take St Giles, from a Window, for example. The poem opens as the speaker reflects on the recent past: ‘Thursday, and they’re ringing in the night.’ However, ‘They’re practising for when it counts. / The blossoms shake their little / heads but mean assent. They are light / as ash, and do not last as long. / Spring is compacted, thick and green.’ By association, a single Thursday looks as fragile as a little blossom, against which a season is insurmountable. The second stanza returns us to the present and a single Spring itself becomes a puny thing: ‘The church is a stolid stone / in four lanes of noise, unmoved. In old prints this is a wilderness, / the packhorses tramping the last / weary half-mile to the gates. / This used to be a walk, the church its end.’ In the past, even the geography of the city described the symbolic journey of the Christian life, terminating at the church but, today, trapped in the maelstrom of the Banbury and Woodstock Roads, it has lost its centrality. Despite this, wedding bells chime: ‘Only the timing changes, / the high bells lagging, clamouring against / that heavy bass-note which is always right: / though each one has to think that it / will sound out loudest, count the most. Each one has to think it, or the whole / thing will crumble like wet cake. And oh, / but this time is the best time, this time is the best.‘
Silver Fabric Shoe, Wantage, 1920s, at Head Over Heels, a display of hats and shoes (Photo credit: johnfield1)
A few years ago, I lived in Wantage, South Oxfordshire, where, each Christmas, a Dickensian fancy dress fair is held. In Time Again, Boxall imagines Lord and Lady Wantage’s 1885 Tudor-style pageant for the citizens of Wantage: ‘The green / is a hunting ground bristling with hounds – / that cats take the part of the deer. // Jousters knock each other down / by turn, a Victorian politeness. A bullfight is promised where appropriate. // The town has thought of everything – though / the tailoring is slightly out of true: / ladies are upheld with pins and tucks.’ While each peal of bells is as authentic as the first, there is something tawdry and dishonest about a pageant in which the values of one culture are transplanted onto another, yet, surveying the glories of Dickensian fancy dress fair, perhaps tawdriness is Wantage’s geist and, looking at the silver fabric shoe in the Head over Heels exhibition, I hoped fervently that it is our indomitable spirit which, like a peal of bells – a peal of laughter – will drift though time unchanged.
There’s a compelling clarity to Ship of the Line. In Pentimenti, mistakes, no matter how well hidden, will out and in Boxall’s hymn to Pitt Rivers Museum, superstition will not die. Follies is an unsettling skit on the view through the window travelling southwest by rail and The Port Meadow Wedding plots the meadow’s ‘undug archeology.’ On and off, I have been reading this collection since March and have fallen in love with it.
Swanswell and Foleshill, Coventry (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
BEFORE THE RAIN CAME
Our ring road is a forced marriage
of IKEA sky once held together
by medieval beams.
Many times my city has walked through me
and turned to stone in my eyes
when I took a piss on Spon Street.
A pub served mead the old way here,
landlords made way for baristas
boasting fair-trade on tax free plots.
Our city was made by flames,
the phoenix was a welder’s torch,
men like my Da before the rain came.
Our city was a blank canvas
two tones barely mixing,
bleeding separately away from each other.
Many times my brothers walked past me
down Foleshill Road in the rain,
those colours should have ran.
Then Coventry would be grey,
two tone,
beautiful.
(Reprinted with kind permission)
If you’ve spent enough time on your knees, then you’ll recognise the sound of a city church breathing. The Amazon audiophiles who take issue with the clutter of background noise on Nonsuch’s recording of Gorecki’s Miserere miss the point: sacred music deserves a sacred location and to sanitize it, to remove the inhalation and exhalation of the church doors as they’re sucked in and out by gusts and draughts, the pulse of the traffic, would be to rip it from its soul. Some things are bigger than us. They resist control and, despite our best efforts, they’re dirty around the edges.
The High Altar – Coventry Cathedral (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Year I Loved England, a collaboration between Joseph Horgan and Antony Owen, feels like an urban Hymns Ancient & Modern, as the medieval and the modern city converge, stopping in the Blitz along the way. Perhaps Before the Rain Came references Santosh Sivan’s 2007 film, Before the Rains, where love, that untamable, perennial inconvenience will out, regardless of nationalism and sectarianism. The poem exists in tension and uncertainty, as ‘Our ring road is a forced marriage.’ The first person plural creates a sense of community and, as a ring, it points towards perfection, towards eternity. This is quickly undercut by ‘forced marriage.’ Suddenly the ring road’s a halter and the shared values that allow the possibility of an ‘us’ fragment. After all, IKEA draws a larger Sunday congregation to its ring road cathedral than the good old C of E can pull towards the traditional one in the city centre. Despite the poem’s up-to-the-minute bitter satirical edge, its ‘baristas / boasting fair-trade on tax free plots,’ this contemporary highway robbery is juxtaposed with an older one, as the ironic ‘landlords’ reminds the reader of their thraldom to the breweries. The repetition of ‘two tones’ nods to Coventry’s finest sons, The Specials, whose Jerry Dammers founded the label, 2 Tone Records. The band’s anti-racist agenda echoes through Horgan’s and Owen’s contemporary Coventry, as ‘Many times my brothers walked past me / down Foleshill in the rain.’ Perhaps this Muslim salutation might be taken as a sign of difference and distance by some but here the possessive ‘my’ takes the greeting literally. Take a walk down Foleshill, past The Co-operative Funeral Care’s Asian Funeral Services, Sheikh Bro’s Halal Meat & Poultry and the Bharat International supermarket. Mock Tudor turns my stomach: it was only ever a property developer’s tawdry, bastardized little dream version of what they thought we thought England should be. Forget it. Foleshill’s neutralisation of this little England architectural horror is a gift to Coventry. As a living, evolving, beautiful organism, England has a future. It’s when we stop evolving, when we turn instead to some Lilliput Lane nightmare, that we might as well be dead. Coventry has been allowed no such luxury. The ‘city was made by flames, / the phoenix was a welder’s torch.’
The Dubliner pub, Digbeth High Street, Birmingham, following an arson attack in 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Paddies trades Before the Rain Came’s optimistic first person plural for the dour net curtain twitching racism of yesteryear: ‘And all around here there were Paddies , / on this street and that street, down there, / Paddies, and they had their social clubs here / and there, look, there, they had their church / and the school where their kids went, / loads and loads of kids, / running around the place with their Paddy / names and their Paddy faces // and their English accents.’ The poem opens in medias res, which contributes to its sense of breathless, incandescent anger. Repetition allows Paddies to overrun the poem, like a plague, until the stanza break, where the plague suddenly disappears, assimilates – and reconstructs postwar Britain – food for thought as the media stake-out airports to whip up hysteria at the latest round of Eastern European immigration.
It’s easy to understand why a poet might want each poem in a collaboration like this individually credited. However, Horgan and Owen’s approach is more egalitarian – their poems stand side by side, 2 Tone, brothers. As far right politicians like Marine Le Pen offer their public easy scapegoats, this collection offers an urgent, contemplative, inclusive, optimistic vision. The final poem, Endreel (3), begins: ‘The best silence / is in the gaps. / In the empty inner city-house, / in the lull between engines, / in the tap room as it opens.’ It might not be neat, green and pleasant, but neither’s Jerusalem. Grey too is beautiful.
In crystal, snowflakes, frost, a tight-furled
sunflower’s spiral of hulls, a floret
of broccoli’s fractal beauty, such arrays
and iterations! O baroque arranger of the world,
clockmaster, maker of matryoska, in secret
patterning stem, seed, atom, say
that at the heart, the carpel core of the familiar
flower—red rose of Petrarch’s sonnet,
petals plucked but golden ratio obeyed—
a figure pf the whole, itself self-similar,
remains.
(Reprinted with kind permission)
The golden ratio (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Commodore Amiga changed my view of nature. In the ’80s, a vivid imagination was required to enjoy playing video games. The blocky graphics and garish colours resembled nothing in nature but, if you screwed up your eyes and wished, then those now endearingly retro graphics would open up onto verdant vistas of imagination. One day, visiting a flush mate’s house, I clapped eyes on the Amiga. In that computer the faltering first steps yielded to a new generation, a generation which rendered delicately shaded mountain peaks wreathed in skeins of cloud. How? Iterated algorithms baby. Fractals. These graphics weren’t just better, they were easier. If a computer’s given a simple formula to crunch and, if it’s crunched often enough, then a cloud or a mountain is just maths. It’s like Thomasina tells her tutor, Septimus, in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: ‘Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?’ Yet again, while the world thought him mad, Blake was right all along: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.’
SunFlower: the Fibonacci sequence, Golden Section (Photo credit: lucapost)
And so it’s difficult not to love the curtal sonnet, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ¾ reduction of the Petrarchan sonnet, a miniaturization of nature that distills it to its essence like a fine single malt. It’s an uncommon form so, when Osmond’s layout replicates that of Pied Beauty, you’d be forgiven for anticipating an apprentice piece from a journeyman poet. Not so. Osmond’s curtal sonnet sounds its theme in its first few words: ‘In crystal, snowflakes.’ The snowflake under the microscope offers an epiphany of the infinite as, at high magnification, each node and arm offers a vertiginous journey into yet more nodes and arms. Viewed like this, nature’s taskmistress is the Golden Section and art and nature converge in the hands of the ‘baroque arranger of the world.’ Osmond’s curtal sonnet is far from a pale homage. Our incessant miniaturization of gadgets and computing power makes this poem feel necessary, somehow. Hell, even the key mathematical term gets a name check in the ‘broccoli’s fractal beauty.’ This poem may be playful and exuberant, it may wink cheekily at the past but Osmond’s vision requires the curtal sonnet. No other form would fit the bill (and this poem demands form). This vision of the infinite sounds the keynote for this pamphlet, as its main poem, ‘The Fire in the Cottonian Library,’ this time inspired by Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,’ treads similar ground as it asks its anguished ‘why?’
‘The Fire in the Cottonian Library’ takes as its subject the conflagration that licked at the margins of Beowulf as Ashburnham House burned in 1731. The collection’s class marks were referenced against the busts of the classical figures that topped the shelves and so, as Nero once fiddled, he witnesses it again: ‘The Lord alone can tell / what secrets smoke away under Nero’s / bust. As Rome roared once before the ill-reputed // Emperor’s eyes, / again a spark takes hold / beneath his blank stone stare and rises / to consume the corridors, the old / fuel-filled labyrinthine city of forgotten lore.’ It’s beautiful stuff, as Rome’s ‘roar’ is at once both the wind of the firestorm and a city pulsing with life. Fire’s both destroyer and essential force as, once again, behind the Emperor’s eyes, ‘a spark takes hold.’ Just as the Cottonian fire reanimates Nero, dragons fly again as the Lindisfarne Gospels glow in the heat: ‘a dragon came / to Lindisfarne, we read, / loosed, fantastic, from illuminates frame / into the real, thunderous, by Bede. / Brutal-winged, wind-beating beast! / Riot, roar and fire! Fear-fed relic of Viking raids, / nightmare of the North by Noretheast / too cruel, without mythic cloak, in chronicle to name, // it flies again, flitting / on an updraft, drifting. The scrap of hand-drawn / well-scribed script’s stipped back and, swirling, / furls – a flaming sun at dawn.’
Faith never came easily to Hopkins. Far from it, as Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves attests. This goliath of a sonnet comes close to breaking the form under its weight of groaning, as Hopkins was racked by his long dark night of the soul. However, The Wreck of the Deutschland sees him in brighter mood, as God salvages something from the otherwise senseless loss of the Deutschland: ‘is the shipwreck then a harvest, / does the tempest carry the grain for thee?’ Osmond grapples with the opposite: the senseless destruction of beauty: ‘Why, God? Why? Why / grant the lower lyric licence / to pass, past to present, but deny / the right of the unrhymed, dense- / ly alliterative half line to life, and let it die unleafed?’ Well, if poems of this calibre are anything to go by, then the pulse of poetry past throbs in the humble veins of our contemporaries. Conservatism in the arts does no-one any good. We cannot believe that humanity’s best work is behind us and that all that’s left is to re-read Dante and Shakespeare — not that there’d be anything wrong with doing this. Poetry of the calibre of Variant Air should give us hope for the future and, if we keep reading, then nothing will be lost.
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Poor Rude Lines: poetry reviews & recommendations by John Field 