Book of the Month

July 2003

It has two front covers. You read the first half of the book one way, then flip it over and start again to read the second half. Or the first half. Because there's no apparent preference. This new publisher has managed a splendid design of this complicated arrangement, and even the spine can be read in both directions. So the book has two beginnings, a middle, and no identifiable end.

Some of this book has already appeared in Shearsman, so it's obvious that I'll approve of it, but it has been a great pleasure getting to know the rest of it, set properly between (two front) covers. Burns's style is unpredictable these days; his last volume, The Manager, was an extraordinary 100-poem sequence about the life of a corporate man, with a multitude of voices, related in very long lines that the author terms verse-paragraphs. The sequence is to be performed by actors at Stratford this year, which will give you some idea of how direct its level of communication might be. The Manager was a significant shift from Burns's previous work, or so it appeared to me, though it's true that, if you go back over his entire oeuvre, he never stayed in one place for very long, personally or poetically, so the concept of departure here may well be inappropriate.

It's a repeated observation on Burns's books that he looks beyond the English tradition and considers himself a European poet, rather than an English one. Now, that's something that I'm all in favour of; here, that internationalism manifests itself by reference to the Kabbalah and the I Ching, and by repeated reference to other locations. One half of the book contains the 18-poem sequence Sketches With Voice-Overs, Nine Codas (which appeared in Shearsman 53) and the found-poem Code of Practice which, just to complete the game of reversal, has alternate lines printed in reverse, and the whole or which which is printed in mirror image on the opposite page. This half of the book is composed in verse-paragraphs of varying lengths. The authorial first-person(a) is prominent, staking out its space:

I walk across the theomorphic grass. I stride through shadowless
   heaven carpeted with flowers.

The deserts of my body are strewn with oases. My hands are a map
   of boulevards. On the roof of my secret house

Cranes have built a nest. From my balcony I watch them fly till they
   are dust against the mountain. This afternoon

A beautiful woman. Wearing a loose knit dress

Smiled at me for no reason as I strolled down the road of kings

(Sketches 1)

 

The headlines today are death. But we are all traitors. The personal
   column says: Wanted, Hope. In various permutations. I wonder
   who the angels will take away first.

[…]

The situations vacant page says: Wanted, A Victim. I agree. It is time
   to go. I am just about ready. For I too was one of the fallen. But
   I too shall rise again. Somehow.

(Sketches 8)

This is not a fashionable poetry as things stand in the UK today, or anywhere else in the anglophone world for that matter, but it has a total honesty and an interest in possibilities of communication, celebration and elegy that much modern poetry lacks. It also, perversely, interrupts itself, disrupts itself as if the author distrusts his own omnipotent narratorial voice.

Going the other way in this book, we have the 50-plus page collection of poems called Following, some of which also appeared in issue 53 and all of which are rooted in readings from the I Ching; each poem begins with the relevant hexagram, and a guide is provided to the hexagrams so that the reader can compare the poems with the book's definitions. I've not looked at the I Ching for 30 years. (I distinctly recall an afternoon, thirty years ago, on which my fortune was told through the Tarot, and my future course of action was dealt with by reference to the I Ching. It was the sort of thing one did in those days….).

Ancient Chinese wisdom aside, the acid test is whether the poems survive as independent artefacts. They do. In contrast to the long-limbed verses of the other half, these poems are short lyrics, or sequences of such, and exhibit a delightfully light touch. Here's Past Coppice Island from Two Lakes:

Once you've rowed past
Coppice Island, everything
You do and say can be and is

Lighter and cleaner than
Wherever you've been or
Have come from. You can

Float your very own
Waterscapes and even
Invent geographies

Just as here the words
Go flowing on under
And around these oars

The poem-boat wields
And takes us slow and steady
Together to the point where

It comes to rest in
A final space called
Silence because I will it.

Or In the peaceful night from Making:

In the peaceful
Night no-one
Disturbs but

Unplaceable voices
Calling words
From an unknown

Language in my
Own head
Which I know

I understand and
Speak, even though never
How. Light a candle,

They call. On
This your table
In this your air

Over this your
Sorrow before
This your grave.

Death is a repeated presence in these lyrics, but it doesn't weigh them down. The poet sets out his stall in the title poem that precedes the whole sequence: Lean and strong / Poems, is how I / I want you now, the way // You have to be. There is / Nothing else for it. You / Have to stand up / Against Death and in / The face of Death / Not collapse.[…] I'm following your directions, // So when Death blows or calls / Me or anyone out, you / Will pass, last, endure.

So, no despair here in the face of death or its inevitability; rather an impassioned engagement with the terrors of the world and a confidence in the ability of the lyric voice to deal with it. Book With No Back Cover is a life-affirming book that ought to convince a poetry public, whose taste has been deadened by too much pap, that verse still has something to say that matters.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman website 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 Book of the Month selections in 2003.