I’m reading, with Catherine Walsh and a host of others, at the Prague Microfestival of international writing, art, film and performance this weekend. The programme is available here. I’ll be reading from/launching The City Itself, which is nice. The Irish launch will be my reading at Soundeye in Cork later in the summer.
Work in the latest issue of Icarus
Some sections from a work in progress called Uncertain Songs appears in the latest issue of Icarus magazine. Icarus is a student literary magazine from Trinity College, Dublin and has been publishing continuously since 1950. The issue is a mix of student and non-student poets and is well work a look. apart from me, the poets featured are:
Randolph Healy
Gisèle Scanlon
Colette Bryce
Alden Mathieu
Ed Salley & Leo Dunsker
Ed Salley
Sophie Fitzpatrick
Kit Fryatt
Molly-May O’Leary
Sean Pierson
Gerald Dawe
Ciar McCormick
Imaan Bari
Benjamin Keatinge
Jay Mulhall
Ciarán O’Rourke
Michelle Nicolaou
Sarah Hayden
With thanks to the editors, Leo Dunsker & Will Fleming.
Share this:
Fay Musselwhite, Matthew Clegg and Michael Haslam: A Review
Contraflow by Fay Musselwhite, Longbarrow Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1906175306, £12.99
The Navigators by Matthew Clegg, Longbarrow Press, 2015, ISBN 9781906175269, £12.99
Scaplings by Michael Haslam, Calder Valley Poetry, ISBN 9780993497384, £7.00
Contraflow is Fay Musselwhite’s first collection, a substantial book of over 100 pages in Longbarrow’s typically handsome, pleasingly designed hardback series. It’s a book full of people doing things and the writing is suitably muscular and physical to reflect this. Often the activity is heavy with a sense of necessity, things done to ensure survival, be it foraging for firewood:
Alone or in pairs by dark we go,
every day or so, for armfuls that warm us
twice at least – as we handle it home,
cleave it apart for the hearth brought to light
by peeling back years of emulsion, paper, tin
and a squatting of soot.
[From ‘Firewood’]
or visiting a friend in a block of council flats:
I spiral up the concrete stairwell,
and my footsteps reverb – I can hear them
gaining on me half a floor below.
At the landing I push on through the wired glass
to carpet that clings to my soles,
a grin for Min’s spy-hole and I’m in.
[From ‘Tales from Min’s and Other Storeys’]
There’s a heft to the writing that enacts the action here, a pleasure in sound patterning that is absent in so much contemporary poetry. Musselwhite’s use of assonance, internal rhyme and alliteration lends a musicality to her verse, and it’s not in any sense fey music, this is full-blown orchestration and it makes for invigorating reading. There is, I think, more than a trace of the influence of Dylan Thomas, but Musselwhite’s voice is all her own.
And despite her interests in walking and rivers, the landscape of these poems is essentially urban, or more correctly fringe urban. Musselwhite is drawn to marginal places: deprived estates; disused industrial sites; hidden rivers; abandoned mill races. There is a sense of people and nature surviving, but not thriving, everything just getting by, an open, questioning narrative pulse that lifts the ‘I’ centred poems to a level way above the curse of the closed, self-satisfied anecdote that infects so much contemporary verse. Another strand in the book is the decline and death of British post-war liberal optimism: planned Modernist ‘rational’ housing intended to usher in a Utopian equality of opportunity becomes so-called sink estates; the Welfare State, designed to act as a safety-net against poverty becomes a poverty trap; the 60s drug culture dream of opening the doors of perception actually opens a trapdoor to despondency and addiction.
At the heart of the book there are two rivers, the Rivelin and Loxley, especially in to sequences, the long ‘Memoir of a Working River’, in thirteen sections, and the shorter ‘Flood Tryptic: The Loxley’. In the former, the course of the river is tracked from source to its confluence with the Loxley. Musselwhite draws on the historical record of the Rivelin’s industrial past as power source for corn and steel mills, as well as her apparent personal familiarity with the valley as source material. She chooses to exemplify the river as an old man, a device that can be a bit clunky at points, but the poem contains some of her best verbal music, as in this evocation of water tumbling over a weir and into a mill race:
while the risen elite, fleet
silver-lick shifting, race keen
is chicaned to a side lane
to slip along thinly, spit gravel, he’s shallow
arrives in a vast mud-lined vessel – pent
seething, he swells
And, in the eleventh section, there is a glimpse of that accidental rewilding that happens when we abandon places we can no longer derive economic benefit from. It’s perhaps the most optimistic, Edenic even, passages in the whole book:
Trees steal back to comfort healing land –
banished for centuries by grind’s fear of flame
– as wheel-gates close he’s dappled again.
The Flood sequence also draws on documentary sources and personal knowledge, this time to focus on a flood that caused havoc and death in 1864 when the river burst its banks. The writing is so immediate and vivid that on initial reading without reference to the notes, I thought it was a more recent flood that the poet had been immediately involved in. In these poems, Musselwhite is a particularly vivid archaeologist, drawing on such shards of evidence that are available to her to evoke an entire world with an admirable economy of language.
Contraflow is a formidable first book, carefully constructed, generally very well written, and very nicely produced. It leaves me looking forward in anticipation to what comes next from Musselwhite’s pen.
The Navigators is Matthew Clegg’s second full-length book, both again from Longbarrow, and again it’s a handsome piece of bookmaking. The book circles around the North of England, and as with Musselwhite, rivers flow through it, as it were. Carrying on from the poems in the final section of his previous collection, West North East, Clegg uses more open, freer forms for many of the poems in this newer book, a fact that he recognises in a note at the end. His original poems are bookended by versions of short passages from Greek epic, opening with Odysseus in Hades from Book 11 of the Odyssey and closing with the effect of Orpheus’ song on Jason’s crew from near the beginning of the Argonautika.
It is impossible to preface a book of poems with that particular passage from Homer without inviting comparison with Pound’s Cantos However, Clegg’s choice of epilogue makes it clear that he does not share Pound’s epic pretentions. Apollonius was the first Greek epic poet to place an almost clinical dissection of love at the centre of his work, and it is a different Pound quote, again from Clegg’s note, that reveals what is at the core of this book; the line quoted is from ‘Exile’s Letter’: ‘there is no end of things of the heart’. The Navigators takes us on a trip around Clegg’s love of particular places and people: his grandfather, the boat he built in retirement, and the canals they sailed it on; the Lake District, the waterways of South Yorkshire; a handful of women who shared some of these experiences with him.
The writing is clear and understated:
The thought of sleeping on my granddad’s boat
would tie a little reef knot in my gut
in case it might be true what my cousin said
about the earwigs squeezed in every nook
that scaled your neck and face when you dozed off
and crawled into your ears and eyes and mouth.
[from ‘The Passage’]
There is a tendency at times for the poems to veer off into somewhat inconsequential anecdotal chatter, but in the best poems, such as the haiku-like ‘Trig Points’ sequence and the very strong final ‘Cave Time and Sea Change’ set, there’s a pleasing supple strength:
Today
you’re a mollusc
and we’re
squawking gulls.
You draw
your shell down
tight
and suck.
[from ‘Counting Stones’]
and:
Greens and ochres and cobalts ink the walls,
but offer no windows of light, no icon.
Your mania was stilled here in these pools.
You’d almost forgotten your slow approaches
to the sloshing cave mouth. Those seagull flocks
were grace notes rising from new-scored horizon.[from ‘Cave Time and Sea Change’]
Overall, despite some unevenness that you would expect from a collection of poetry that runs to over 123 pages, this is an interesting book and a clear advance in range and technique from West North East. The ‘Trig Points’ sequence, written when Clegg was poet in residence at The Wordsworth Trust, is one of the most accomplished new haiku sequences in English that I’ve come across for some time. The sequence, or renku, maps the inner and outer worlds with a musicality that is all too uncommon in the form:
Lit coals crack and fly.
Later, dim, they’ll give nothing
To their next of kin.
There’s a half line in the 36th and final numbered section in Michael Haslam’s Scaplings that could almost serve as a stand-alone review of the book: ‘With where I live I do love to be friends.’ The sequence is a declaration of love for the country around Haslam’s home in Hebden Bridge and the words and phrases used to name its features in the local dialect. Haslam’s first book, Continual Song, is one of the key texts of the later stages of the British Poetry Revival and announced the arrival of a significant new voice in British verse.
That book was, in part, an investigation into the nature of soul, and this is a direct link with Scaplings. In ‘A brief glossography’ appended to the end of the book, Haslam remarks that ‘Soul is that classic oxymoron. An immaterial substance’. As I read these poems I found myself reflecting that if soul is a function of the mind and mind is, for a poet at least, achieved through language, then the soul of this poetry is to be found in Haslam’s exuberant, joyous wordplay that opens up the spaces between words to let the world in:
The sweet tea tastes eternally ephemeral as fairy cake,
a light confection, as to play is like to laik, as plea is pleased
to plead for pleasure, prayer for the revenue, unmeasured praise
in reverie, a sheer lake glade, a risen rose, a misted
forest mere
[from ‘7’, and once you start quoting, it’s almost impossible to stop]
Like both Musselwhite and Clegg, Haslam shares a fascination with the particularities of the landscape of the North of England, and as with Musselwhite, it is possible to suspect the influence of Thomas (and British surrealist/apocalyptic poetry of the 1930s/40s):
The invisible worms in the visible words may squirm within
an invalid homology between the workaday world
and the demonic cobblers tampering with pins
the blethered soles.
[from ‘20’]
As I said above, Scaplings is a love poem, and a poem to spring, with its own aisling figure in ‘april in a flowered apron’ (in the glossography, Haslam is at pains to point out that he uses lower-case initials or proper nouns to create fruitful ambiguities). The flowered apron will, depending on your tastes and reading, summon up images of La Primavera by Botticelli, the Welsh flower goddess Blodeuwedd, or even Samuel Ferguson’s ‘The Apron of Flowers’, a poem that owes much to the old song ‘Do You Love an Apple’. Haslam’s Calder Valley is known intimately through both immediate experience and his understanding of how it is named, and his relationship is priapic, its fecundity issuing in the language of his poem.
Wick quickens, growth regrows; thickets thicken; birkenshaws explode
their nodes in filamental delicates from root to leaf in blue cerulean
along lines of genetic codes. A thunder showers from high heaven
to the green lungs sprung from earth beneath the flowers of the heath
all under powers gathering their lower lower glowers o’er the hearth,
the heart of hillfog heathen hovel home, to puddle in the peaty loam
in muddy muddle.
[from ‘35’]
Haslam also invokes the twin shades of Blake and Newton, poles of opposing views of the world, and despite the visionary nature of his language, Newton is not really rejected; how, after all, could a dedicated glossator reject science? Indeed, there is a fine irony, a kind of double bluff, in lines like these:
Apology. I graduated from a college with small knowledge of what
frequency and wave meant, And I haven’t even heard of hymenopteran
vespology. The oakleaves fall and my imagination of the real has failed.
A scattering of spangle galls lay patterning a shining causey pavement.
[from 29]
with their fine observation of a crucial stage in the life cycle of the cynipid wasp. And this in a section that earlier alludes to the fate of Blodeuwedd’s husband Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who can only be killed in the most peculiar of circumstance by a spear that had been ‘a year in the forming’. Haslam associates the spear with an abandoned mill, ‘depressive-manic’, in an echo of Blake. Clearly, he is as aware as anyone of the eco-political dimension of our relationship with the earth, something that he specifically calls out in ‘16’:
… When water passed
to private hands the heart deflated and evaporated from the state.’
The reality is that each reading opens up new ways of engaging with Haslam’s marvellous, engaging, infuriating, baroque lyric. What holds it all together is an innate musicality, as, for instance, the perfect balance of long-short-short-long vowel sounds on the alliterating stresses of this half line from ‘18’: ‘Flayed by fangs how her fur flies.’ Thirty-odd years of listening to the sounds of the world lie behind a phrase like that. We must be grateful to Haslam for sharing the results of his investigations and to Calder Valley Poetry for publishing them with an unfussy elegance. Read this book.
Share this:
Charlotte Nooth: Irish Woman Poet
Little is known about Charlotte Nooth other than that she published Original Poems, and A Play in 1815. As some of her work is in the Dialect of Northern Ireland, it is surmised that she may have been born there.
SONG.
If Ellen, we indeed must part,
I wish we ne’er had met.
For well I know, this throbbing heart.
Can ne’er our loves forget.
My thoughts will ever rest on thee.
On happy moments fled;
And I the sole example be
Of Love when hope is dead.
SONG
Yes Arthur, I smiled in your absence ’tis true.
But then it was only when thinking of you.
Yes, pleas’d with Orlando’s discourse I might seem,
But then it was only when you were his theme.
Then hush your suspicions, dismiss all your fears,
Each moment of absence your image endears.
For the heart once possessed by affection like mine
May in fondness encrease, but can never decline.
Share this:
Recent Reading Five: More Short Reviews
The Noise of Everything at Once, by Chris Burke, Happy House Press, paperback and Kindle, ISBN: 979-1091619073
at vacuum’s edge, by Michael McAloran, Black Editions Press, ISBN: 9781326772123, 7.00 euro
Bridge of the Ford, by Susan Connolly, Shearsman Press, ISBN 978-1-84861-465-9, £10.95
Da Capo al Finne, by Krzysztof Bartnicki, ISMN: 9790902013109
Chris Burke is a Paris-based English journalist and poet whose work in this, his first collection, is a curious amalgam of a kind of Anglicised version of hard-boiled American and straightforward English whimsy. Typically, the poems in The Noise of Everything at Once use wit as a distancing device, a refusal of seriousness that might be seen as the dominant mode of post- movement English verse. This tone, for want of a better word, can be illustrated by these lines from ‘Columbo’s last case’, a poem about Alzheimer’s, addressed as the culprit in the case:
And here’s the bit
you think I’m done
then I stop, turn in the doorway
only Mrs Columbo
she lays trash bags on the doormat
keeps me from walking out
and I’ve been stuck in this spot
15 years, trawling for some line to say
It’s a tone that becomes problematic in a poem like ‘La Mort aux Juifs’, a meditation on the European tradition of casual Anti-Semitism set as a parody of ‘Adelstrop’:
Yes. I remember Death to Jews –
the name, because one afternoon…
because the name. It was ‘Juin’
I imagine it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Such lapses aside, Burke can write well and interestingly, and, when he drops the ironic mask, movingly, as in the very fine poem ‘Gravid’:
No fault of yours
the word, its strain of burden,
load, stone
to be engraved, cold
gravityreaching up to pull
your child from weightless
space to ground
then grave. Blame mewho found the root in Latin,
lost, shivering,
something of my own to raise.
Here, with the carapace of wit stripped away, Burke finds a voice to call his own. It would be nice to think that having found it, he will produce more work in this vein.
at vacuum’s edge is composed in Michael McAloran’s characteristic disjunctive prose, a single block of italicised writing some 33 pages long, divided in to bursts ranging in length from one word to several lines, separated by slashes. These can be seemingly random phrases – ‘/dressage blind orchid/’ or almost entirely conventional sentences – ‘/time’s passage given to mark the flesh as if it were/’.
There are a number of recurring motifs that emerge: the title phrase and variants on the idea of vacuum, including ‘vacant’, ‘absent’, ‘hollow’, ‘nothing; the double ‘echo-echo’, again with variants; the idea of the human as meat, along with copious quantities of bodily excretions of all sorts. In the first third or so, imagery from the Christian mythos is prevalent, with particular emphasis on the word ‘chalice’, which is, additionally, another empty container with echoes of all sorts clustered round it. Several of the themes of these opening pages come together in the phrase ‘chalice of bone’, after which the religious language gives way, although not quite completely, to images of the body as site of decay, ‘a vacancy of meat’ with desire reduced to ‘a vacant lot of burnt bones a vacant cityscape’.
Much of this links with earlier work by McAloran that I reviewed last year, even the titles of those books, EchoNone and In Absentia, attest to a continuity across his writing, a continuity underscored by the ellipses that open and close edge. As I said in the earlier review, it would be easy to mistake McAloran’s stance for nihilism, but this would be a serious category error. Despite the surface bleakness of the work, there is an urge to persistence that denies the null. We are, after all, at vacuum’s edge, not in its suffocating heart, and the edge of a vacuum is marked by that which is full. Where there is an echo, there is a voice, and where there is a voice, there is not no thing. The act of writing is an act of affirmation in the face of the void of incomprehension, or, as the book ends, with at abundance of nothing that is still an abundance:
/it is said alone/said alone yet foreign and unsaid/undone/(an empty
echoing abounding)..
Concrete or visual poetry is not particularly common in Irish verse. Apart from Some short pieces and the epic Monster by Brian Coffey and a few pieces by Trevor Joyce, I struggle to think of any instances. Given this unfortunate circumstance, the appearance of an entire collection of visual poems by Drogheda poet Susan Connolly is, almost by default, something of an event.
Bridge of the Ford is the English for Droichead Átha, the Irish name for Connolly’s home town, and the bridge is over the Boyne,
the Irish river that is richest in mythological and historic freight. Indeed, the first half of the book is a sequence of images in words tracing a journey down the Boyne, through the town and out to the sea. The texts draw on place names and the visual appearance of local monuments as the material from which they are built.
The second section of the book is less unified, although religious themes predominate. The absence of a central conceit allows for a greater range of forms to emerge in this section, as Connolly plays with the words of carols, or single letters repeated in geometric patterns derived from medieval manuscripts.
In her introduction, she cites Ian Hamilton Finlay as an influence, which may have been an unfortunate thing to do. While the pieces in this book are highly competent, they lack that spark of imaginative genius that make Finlay’s concrete pieces exceptional. In fact, with the street-name map poems, the lists of names on the facing pages are more alive than the visual representations opposite.
In a note for the blurb, Paula Meehan notes that among the ‘charms’ of Bridge of the Ford ‘are the glimpses in this book of a fugitive Irish lyric poet flitting through the pages.’ Although this was clearly intended as praise, I think Meehan inadvertently highlights the main problem with this work. Connolly is, indeed, an Irish lyric poet and, like most Irish lyric poets, she is focused on locality rather than place, with the poet as actor, not recorder, the ‘I’ as an unproblematic identity, with no need for recuperation as it was never really questioned. Connolly’s decision to move to a visual mode of writing is a brave, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at transcending the limitations of the tradition her writing voice is embedded in. She clearly understands and enjoys playing with concrete techniques; however, pouring lyric content into a visual poetry jug cannot transform that content into something it isn’t. These poems, for all their virtues, are made as visual pieces not from necessity but from volition, and ultimately that just isn’t enough.
Krzysztof Bartnicki’s Da Capo al Finne is an extraordinary, uncategorizable work of conceptual something or another. It is, on the most literal level, a reading of Finnegans Wake, but a most unusual reading. In the introduction to this English-language edition, Bartnicki declares the Wake a failed novel, based on what he sees the essential criteria that literature should ‘convey information, didactic patterns, or emotions’. He argues that despite the best efforts of the book’s exegetes, it cannot be fitted into and available literary model, and so is, in essence, unreadable as such.
Further, Bartnicki’s view is that this frees the Wake to a much wider range of uses as an object. It’s a variant on the old canard that Joyce’s great work is unreadable, a view that simply does not stand up when one considers the simple fact that people have, and continue both to read it and to report on the experience. This odd hybrid of Gothic cathedral and Baroque palace of mirrors may not be a novel in any conventional sense, but it is literature, just not as we know it.
However, discussion of the rightness or wrongness of Bartnicki’s premise is neither here nor there. The real interest lies in what he has done with it. And what he has done is to present the Wake ‘stripped of all spacing, punctuation, digits, letters except for lower- and uppercase A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, E’s, F’s, G’s and H’s’. The result is 122 pages of unbroken and literally unreadable text, which is also a long string of variations on the scale of C-major, plus B.
Bartnicki’s practice is to use this bank of potential music to extracts matches, or near matches, to pre-existing musical works, with some of the results being available on his SoundCloud page. |It’s a bit of a mad project, almost as mad as Finnegans Wake itself. It also fits into a wider movement towards using digital media and the Internet to remake Joyce’s book, a movement I discussed in a piece for the Guardian a couple of years back. It seems possible that the Web will finally make the Wake accessible to a wider range of readers, writers and artists. Bartnicki’s sceptical-inventive approach is an interesting element in this process, and I highly recommend it.
