A Journal of Enlightened Panic, Alan Baker, Shoestring Press, 2020, ISBN: 978-1-912524-56-3, £6.00
light light light; 21 Poems, Charlie Ulyatt, Essence Press, 2022, Price dependent on location
Wasp on the Prayer Flag, Maeve O’Sullivan, Alba Publishing, 2021, ISBN 9781912773398, £10/€12/$15
‘When a man goes out’, the opening poem in Alan Baker’s pamphlet, begins with an echo of the folk tradition, specifically the ballad known as ‘As I Roved Out’:
When a man goes out on a Sunday morning among May-month trees
(maple, sycamore, rowan, oak) and sees the tarmac paths,
the metal bench, the individual grass stalks and daises
and realises they’re the same ones he saw forty years ago
Baker’s quickly moves away from the folk tale of sex and deceit towards a journey through a closely observed world was the poem turns first to a meditation on the ecological impacts of our actions, the responsibilities of the artist, and finally the speaker’s mortality, via a return to song:
The songs of summer, where are they? They’re so dependable.
but achingly lonely, so forget them and consider instead
the thoughts a man may encounter as he goes out
on a Sunday morning walking the park in the autumn of his life.
We are travelling but going nowhere except towards an encounter with the self, whatever that may be. The uncertainty and hesitancy of our going in deftly echoed in the weaving of two and three syllable feet, an expectation of an iambic rhythm established and then disrupted by dactyls and amphibrachs knitted together by assonantal patterns of sound in long, capacious lines.
The idea of journey is taken up in the long closing poem ‘Voyager’ which blends the interstellar travels of the titular space probe, the third-person wanderings of Alan through an urban landscape, and stories of seafaring, including references to the Odyssey, specifically the Nekyia:
I think the dead talk to me said Alice,
but Alan doesn’t want to hear that
even though he’s setting out to meet them.
This journey towards the dead takes on more significance at the end when we’re informed in a postscript that the poem is for Baker’s mother, who died in 2015.
Baker plays neatly with he conventions of narrative to create a sense of distance and dislocation:
Alan is pleased to announce that Night
and its attendant Deserted Street
stretched out before him and required
that he walk. That such walks
have the quality of dream.
Between these two longish narrative(ish) poems we find a number of shorter lyrics, mostly addressed to poets and artists. While these are interesting, the meat of the pamphlet is in the bracketing poems discussed above.
While Baker immerses us in the conventions of language, Charlie Ulyatt is engaged in a very different approach to poetry. Here words are stripped of their significance so that their meanings become clear, or at least less unclear. He’s a minimalist, not in the sense of, say, Philip Glass, but in the same way that Issa is a minimalist. The focus is sharp, defined, and deceptively simple. The poems are full of floating pronouns with no referents which opens up these tiny texts to vistas as large as the reader’s experiences:
it’s
not
like
anything
it
just
is
what
it
is
This poetry is almost impossible to discuss, it is, so to speak, what it is, and the temptation is just to point at it and say ‘read’. The movement across the 21 poems collected here is towards silence, to the realisation that the use of words is to bring us to the now and leave us there, connected to some kind of essence:
what
is
there
but
light
light
light
And that is enough. Ulyatt has elevated his chosen poverty of means, his deliberately restricted linguistic range to the condition of art.
light
There is, of necessity a similar but different narrowness to Maeve O’Sullivan’s book of haiku and senryu Wasp on the Prayer Flag. The book is divided into three sections. The first, Seasons, is what we might think of as the ‘traditional’ format for arranging haiku. The second, Sequences, comprises poems primarily concerned with specific locations. The final section, Senryu, contains sequences concerning human nature, with some focus on bereavement and the Covid pandemic. These on the whole are more serious, less ironic, that you might expect from senryu.
Rather than discussing the themes and topics covered, I’m going to focus on a few individual poems to look at how O’Sullivan handles the limitations and potentials of her chosen forms. First, there’s this from the ‘Howth Head’ sequence:
yellow furze in bloom
back down the hill
hot whiskies on the beach
There are varieties of furze that bloom all year round, but traditionally it’s a flower of spring, its golden glow reflecting the warm-cold nature of early sunshine. The hot whiskey echoes this idea of warmth in cold while also providing a visual parallel of the yellow of both flower and sun. The plural ‘whiskies’ introduce a sense of companionship, of a shared human warmth; it’s a whole picture, a cycle of place and time, evoked in 13 words.
There’s an element of a kind of rural psychogeography underlying the place sequences, in the casual but close attention to detail and the interplay between ‘natural’ and ‘human’ elements apprehended. Take this haiku from the ‘Kerry Dreamtime’ sequence:
a Speckled Wood lands
on Japanese knotweed
DO NOT CUT!
the specificity in the naming of the butterfly brings the reader to close focus as it lands on the invasive week, introduced by human intervention and considered a pest but serving the insect’s purposes as well as any native plant would. The last line then folds the warning against cutting, and thereby spreading, the weed into a concern for the scene as a whole, with butterfly, plant and sign forming a composition from which nothing can be removed without disturbing some kind of microcosmic balance.
The last example I want to look at is from the ‘Pandemic’ senryu sequence:
in separate trees
a pair of magpies
a pair of collared doves
The simple complexity of this short poem is what strikes me. The book is full of birds, just being birds. On one level, it’s possible to read the poem as analogical with the human situation during lockdown, separated as we were in our tiny bubbles, alone together. But that’s only one level, perhaps the least interesting one; what these birds do is to remind us that there is a world and a life beyond our concerns, and that it endures without us. During lockdown, many of us became more aware of the avian world, but birds became no more aware of us, they just carried on being birds. This is the picture that O’Sullivan, in her typically understated formal control, presents to us here. This is a book to read and reread.
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