Book of the Month

January 2003

This is one of the books of the year 2002, as welcome as it is unexpected, and since I only read it in December 2002, it sneaks into this selection for January 2003 with a little sleight-of-hand. If I had been running a book of the month series in 2002, this would have been the book for December and it would have been vying for book of the year with C D Wright's extraordinary Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (since nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize in Toronto).

Wendy Mulford is a familiar figure on the UK small press scene, both as a poet and as the founder-editor of Street Editions, which merged with Ken Edwards' press in the 1990s to become Reality Street Editions, still one of more lively and consistent presses around. I'd seen some small chapbooks of Ms. Mulford's work, but had managed to miss out on some significant later work, for reasons that are not clear to me now – stupidity? Blindness? Perhaps. In any event, the missing items are all here, and splendidly printed too. The book comes with fulsome blurbs from J H Prynne (who scores highly for originality in his) and Fanny Howe. Now that's an interesting chorus line. So what's the work like? Feminist, postmodern lyric, sort of. Such classifications don't work in this case, really. The book covers a good 35 years of work, ranging from what-you-might-expect-from-a-beginner-at-the-radical-end-of-the-sixties to ambitious, syncretist works from the 80s and 90s such as The Bay of Naples, the East Anglia Sequence, and the prose fragment La Pitié-Salpetrière. There's not an overriding consistency to the work; the style wanders to meet the content – lyrics tend to be short-lined and limpid, the ambitious works long-lined and thrusting, sometimes combining prose and imported narratives with the poetry. She has a startling command of her work, however, whatever style she adopts. Here's After dinner from the lovely Bay of Naples cycle:

In a drift of eagles
compliance lay on my lips
to heal and to host
the harm held
in a gift of lilacs
(the natural ability)
the cracked crocus
reason framed
in a hand-mirror
the young self-healed
a power of angels
dance and declare war
I can and am able
I breathe and it's chosen
the reluctant head pinned
this terror of words.

©Wendy Mulford, 1992.

Or The Pale Land 1489, from the splendid East Anglia Sequence, a powerful 'poem of place':

No colour no movement
even the marsh frozen
no thing stirs
the ice curls deeper
the skater skates uphill
the banished redshank cries
the far-foraging gull following each boat
pull down the ribbon-thin channel
out the Glaven-mouth to the iron sea.

Each long night I climb to the lightless church
kneel on the cold worn sorrow-stone
kneel where the starlight draws in
through the high clerestory
my prayers clamped to my teeth
only the blood of my lover flows hot
only the warmth of the struggling man
thwarted wrestles the
death-dealing sea

The worse for us waiting
shut out
from marsh from heath from common & pasture
river-bank & sea-shore
Mother of God all desire all
plenitude gone
watching our children starve
no wool no wood no salt no fish
no God
will grant safe passage to our men

© Wendy Mulford, 1998, 2002.

It's work like this that makes you wonder what the average mainstream publisher has against it. I guess Wendy Mulford wouldn't fit too snugly into the kind of marketing campaigns such publishers come up with, but work of this quality deserves to be much more widely-read, and Nicholas Johnson's Etruscan Books has done an excellent job of getting it out into the world, and in such a fine-looking edition too, complete with cover by John Hall. The paperback in particular is cheap at the price, though both editions are excellent value for what you get. Go out and buy it NOW. In the UK you can most easily source it from Peter Riley's mail-order service.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman site at the end of April 2003, with the aim of highlighting certain significant publications that the editor has found particularly exciting. Books of the Month have been selected for earlier months of the year, retrospectively, and one of the 12 chosen volumes will be Book of the Year in December 2003. Click on the months below for other Books of the Month in 2003.