Book of the Month

April 2004

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Multiple chapbooks from The Gig are becoming a habit. About three months back, they issued a pair of excellent chapbooks by Trevor Joyce, a kind of work-in-progress en route to his next major collection. This time it's a triple by Peter Larkin, whose last big book was from Salt, one which I welcomed in these pages a couple of years ago. The advantage of the multiple-chapbook-collection, low-tech but clean in looks, is that — although it's quite a collection of work — it comes in smaller bite-sized chunks, and, as these three have different centres, different sources, they are easier to digest. A single volume containing the work of all three chapbooks would have been harder to deal with.

Larkin's work in recent times has been fired by ecological concerns, and a particular interest in trees. Some of Sprout Near Severing Close appeared in Shearsman quite some time ago, and I was fascinated at the time by the author's approach to his subject, a truly questing and experimental way of dealing with the text. Also it was a different and unusual way of dealing with pastoral material, completely at odds with the traditional method. Larkin is impassioned on the subject, but he's no eco-tourist. Instead his poems inhabit the subject in a most disconcerting manner, the poems subverting one's expectations. Severing Close has a complex underpinning involving the regeneration of trees through natural processes — something I know less than nothing about, which is, basically, irrelevant. The technical aspects mean a complex language surface is on display in these poems. Take no. 6 from this sequence for instance:

Refraction is bract
condenses soft allow-on as origin would not.
The spares of source
spire from adjoining cap.

The lop is pristine severe shroud
thrown up horizontal to lick
living wad with vert.
Uprights attained lean
silhouette their fewer delves.

Arousal at the held swing
infuses across its cut heart-blank.

To fall so strong ago
as can elevate a stump
crawl the vertical spindle wall,
a barrier against the over-height.

Do not look long
at what is poling a spar
faintly accomplice: linkage
slightedly past its severance.

I'm intrigued by the way Larkin uses a specifically unpoetic diction in openly poetic ways — so the assonance of refraction and bract in the first line, for instance. The poem needs more than a bit of work on the reader's part, it is true, but the research should not be beyond the interested reader. The poem here, as well as its sisters in this group, has a strange beauty, only explicable by the masterly manipulation of the poet's materials.

The Wang Wei poems seem to be variations, or imitations of poems by Wang Wei, as delivered in the Penguin selection of that poet. Classical Chinese poetry can seem wonderfully opaque and hard to grasp, because the connections are not available to foreign readers, the allusions to other classical Chinese poets (for instance) slipping away before they are caught. Even the sound of the original poems has slipped away, although I believe there are some interesting conjectures as to the correct pronunciation. As with Japanese haiku, there remains a tone which seems emblematic of Chinese poetry in translation — a lapidary quality — and these versions of Wang Wei retain that quality while presenting the poems with a surface more akin to the Severing Close poems than anything one would expect from the pens of, say, Arthur Waley or David Hinton. Such as the typically lyrical N† 12:

Dense, fragrant, down tall pines
to that mean lane at the trees'
rim. Summer's coll fallen below
the hill, but like high heathland
once more clad, full again
as a single trail. Green is
sharp walking, returns
on its own the signs of office.

 

With Rings Resting the Circuit we are back in the world of the Severing Close poems, though the surface here is denser, and even more suffused with specific arboreal matter. At first the poems seem determinedly unpoetic, but reading them aloud brings out patterns that don't quite appear on the page, at least not on first reading. To be honest, some time after getting it, I'm still poring over Rings, trying to get further into its message. I've found it hard, but with enough pleasures to make the process worthwhile. I don't understand a lot of it — in the way that I don't understand a lot of what's going on in the poetry of, say, John Wilkinson or J.H. Prynne — but repeated reading reveals unexpected pleasures. Here's small section from the beginning of poem 18:

The move stored to occur over the hove,
unfinal stasis    render it towards
or shot from weftage    of curvacious
ways-at
its rapider lain hollow.

These chapbooks are good value, and make an interesting follow-up to the same author's large collection from Salt Publishing, Terrain Seed Scarcity, which also inhabits the world of radical eco-poetics. The three volumes offer views of quite different strands in Larkin's work, from the compacted, dense piling of language in Rings, through the lyrics of Wang Wei to a style that, in some ways, seems to fuse the approaches of the other two in the very impressive Severing Close.

 

This notice is much delayed, for which the editor apologises. The Book of the Month selections should be back on schedule by mid-June 2004 — something which is made easier by the fact that the next two choices have already been made.

Click on the months below for other Book of the Month selections in 2004.

...and 2003.