John Muckle lives in London, and is a regular contributor to P N Review and other journals. Shearsman published his first collection Firewriting and other poems in 2005.

  

 

 

Mapmaking and Pamphleteering:

Keston Sutherland: Neocosis (Barque Press, 2005, 24pp, £4.00); Nicholas Potamitis: N. nontets one to nineteen (Perdika Press , 2006, 23pp, £4.50); Mario Petrucci: Catullus (Perdika Press, 2006, 23pp, £4.50); Christine North: Mallarmé (Perdika Press, 2006, 27pp, £4.50); Jane Routh: Teach Yourself Mapmaking (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2006, 63pp, £7.95)

 

Keston Sutherland is suffering from neo-conservative psychosis. This pamphlet hurled against the new world economic order and its monstrous cartoonisation of existence offers a series of fast jump-cut collages in which Socrates, Aristotle and Prynne jostle one another in the playground. Somebody else seems to keep on interpolating random phrases from a Chinese technical journal about bones. That’s the beginning. It gathers momentum as it goes on. His work has some of the angry energy of rap and the savoury edge of some orange powder sprinkled snack that is extremely bad for you. He hates us and he hates himself. His vocabulary is quite amazing; but the poems only spring to life, for me, at moments when there is something positive to pitch against the denatured chaos of commodification - as he offers a comment on a country dismembered by war:

                                      Over breakfast a Frida
Kahlo or Käthe Kollwitz print may as well dangle drilled into the
                  wall too
                  deep with its rivets not revealed
                  but you know they will be.
And Androcles slapped shut the mouths of mere lions,
and two peoples will be divided up from your body,
miniscule dextrin and carnauba wax rissole, plus gum arabic,
you don't live with a freedom deficit you die for it.

 

Nicholas Potamitis' N. (nontets one to nineteen)is disjunctive, airily arranged, and moves between a classical world and contemporary London with a thread of almost narrative as we follow the questing movements of N. There are echoes of Eliot here – Smyrna merchants, lots of place names, sexual disfunction, a sense of anguish and displacement – but whether his multiple frames of reference lock into overall coherence is open to question. Nevertheless there’s a pleasure to be had in all these glimpses of fleeting scenes, also a sense of humour and an engaging quality that lifts the poems and suggests Potamis mat well be on an interesting journey.

Shot dice in caravanserai from Smyrna
              to Sarajevo our correspondent, now, down on his uppers
         then,       upon breasts of doughy     constantinists
   N­---------'s copy dispatched    irregular               traces
                    voltaic the arc          of trade routes
                    to Stoke Newington —
         in the corner              saloon car of Cypriot wideboy
                    dented escaping carabinieri
                    across the Essex Road

 

Mario Petrucci’s translations of Catullus are published with the Latin texts on facing pages. These modern versions, perhaps too few, are light, skipping, well-turned, and knowing. They sound talkily New Yorkish, highly sophisticated, older, and as intoxicated as ever by their invitations to love and their perennial wisdom about women and desire and all that. Good luck!

Live and let Love, Lesbia! Let
the old men gossip who haven't
a woman's pretty penny to rub
up against. Even hot sun each
day will work its bright end in
and out of the planet's soft quim.
Brief love – then the long sleep.

 

Christine North’s eleven translations of Mallarme sonnets attempt something difficult, but they don’t always succeed, to my ear, in developing an idiom that really carries the force of their mixture of abstraction and voluptuousness and formality in the original French, again printed on facing pages. Part of the problem is that they’re not sure whether they want to be strictly rhymed translations, or slightly freer adaptations, and, helas, sometimes fall between two stools. However, I can see she was encouraged to go on by the striking success of some of them, like this:

The Bellringer

While the church bell rouses its clear voice
Towards the pure, deep, limpid morning air
Over the child who, for its pleasure, throws
An angelus of thyme and lavender,

The ringer, brushed by a light-dazzled bird,
Pitiful straddler, snivelling in Latin
Upon the stone that holds the age-old cord,
Hears nothing but a feeble far-off tinkling.

I am that man. On fain night's rope, alas!
In vain I pull to ring out the ideal,
My cold Sins frolic feathered, ever loyal,

And the voice comes to me disjoint and hoarse!
But one day soon, weary at last of pulling,
I'll shift the stone, o Satan, for my hanging.

 

Jane Routh’s Teach Yourself Mapmaking is her second collection and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is a characterful poet, her work freely espoused, crafted, roiling, sucked along by mysterious tides and undercurrents, full of changes of light and weather, and framed by a sense of hazardous voyaging. As she accurately proclaims in her opening poem, hers is ‘a beautiful art, to draw on worn charts’; but what such maps reveal can be difficult truths:

so that when you key in waypoints
for the autopilot, the waves that engulf you
come close to regret, and you wonder
— as is the way when you're at sea —
what if the waypoint for home
were seasickness, were risk, or skill, or age;
what if the waypoint for happiness, pain?

This could be the announcement of a turbulent voyage, but Routh’s poetry exudes an air of calm concentration, it is ‘meticulous work’. She is a storyteller and an observer of working lives, something of a history poet, somebody who has allowed salt water to seep into her timbers, and who sometimes shivers. As well as her seascapes, she charts the woodlands she manages in North Lancashire, and farming country, and as her book continues she develops a complex sense of personal, family and regional history from these disparate natural landscapes. There is much naming and precision and particularity, rhythms of rural work and the retelling of worn anecdotes that have taken on the gravity of myth. There is also a questioning of her compulsive mapmaking.

What was I hoping for, what was I trying to find
that September afternoon, skimming across
the Humber under slender cables to the other side.
The past of course, something to say this is how it was,
even something forgotten of my own, a view perhaps,
to account for how I imagine ships trawl
the top of an embankment beyond a kitchen window.
But there were no ships. All that brown water
and just a green-hulled light float with its silent bell.
                                                                      (The Reedbed)

I strongly recommend this book: it is rural, traditional in a way, but Jane Routh is a modern woman. She never falls into inert pastoral, is a fine musician, and her places are always alive with the voices of the people who have inhabited them.

 

Copyright © John Muckle, 2007. All quotations are copyright © the authors & translators, 2006.