Book of the Month

June 2004

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It's just a short time ago that I was welcoming a wonderful new collection by Enslin called In Tandem (Stop Press, London, 2003), and here I am welcoming another large collection that overlaps only a little with that British one. The pleasure is mixed with some surprise at finding my last review quoted on the back of this new book. Obviously, I was on the right track…

At the risk of repeating myself, let me say that I find Enslin's late work amongst the finest being written in English today. He writes like no-one else, though I suppose John Taggart sometimes can sound a little like him. This book just reinforces my opinion. I've been sitting here, gleefully chanting these lines aloud to myself, and revelling in the sounds, and at the daring in these compositions. The book consists of nine separate collections of poems, one of which — Sequentiae — was also a separate volume from Stop Press in the late 1990s. The style of all of these poems follows the essentially musical organisation of In Tandem: repetition and variation. Take the opening stanza of the first poem in Skeins:

Such is wanton    not a breeze    not to touch
surrounding wanton touch    a breeze
to feel a pressure wanton to a touch
a breeze in pressure    feeling wanton touch
recurring    touch surrounding is recurrent
wanton    such is not the breeze
not to touch    the mirage might be a
breeze in summer    wanton warmth subsiding
such is wanton    not to touch    is not a breeze
is other season    wanton timing    not to touch it

That's only half a page of this book, and there are almost 300 pages like that, tightly organised, wide vocabulary reduced in favour of variations on a low word-count, rhythmically aware, not to say astute.

Enslin lives in the woods of Maine — and it's good to see him being supported by the Maine-based NPF once again — and the sights and sounds of the natural world suffuse these poems, as do the more minimalistic experiences of the household, but even in this honed-down verbal universe, there's room for contemplation, for philosophy:

As to speak of life one speaks of death
a counterpart    but no    not knowing is the same
one speaks of life    life dying    dying life
to live    the Christmas marigold    a memory
or death    the flower living    still a timing
flower of death    to speak of life life's counterpart
one speaks of dying as it lives    not counterpart
it is the life    a core of living speak of it
of death and marigold    its flower living
spectre of life not death    the spectre if the life
a life in death a counterpart the marigold
past the shortest days of life long death….
… [7 lines dropped here]…
one speaks of death    a Christmas marigold.

I can't begin to tell you how good this book is. I've not read a better one all year, and I've not often been this excited by a new book, especially by an established name. Here's to Enslin, poet, composer and woodsman. The best poetry makes you see the world anew, as if freshly planted. That's what Enslin does in this collection, which is a source of inexhaustible delights.

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

...and 2003.