Ali
Alizadeh: Eyes
in Times of War
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 148pp, £10.99/$16.95;
isbn 9781844712878)
Vivian Smith: Along
the Line
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 132pp, £9.99/$15.95; isbn
9781844710669)
Matthew Cooperman: Daze
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 120pp, £9.99/$15.95; isbn
9781844712571)
Jerry Harp: Urban
Flowers, Concrete Plains
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 116pp, £9.99/$15.95; isbn
9781844712731)
David Hamilton: Ossabaw
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 116pp, £9.99/$15.95; isbn 9781844712601)
Eyes in Times of War is a collection which, despite its subject of
war and the difficulties of an Iranian immigrant integrating into
a western society intolerant of racial and cultural difference, fails
to turn such subject matter into writing of any distinction. It
is, perhaps, not insignificant that out of a collection consisting
of 138 pages the first 108 pages contain poems written solely in
couplet form. This formal repetition seems to reinforce the impression
of a monotony of feeling in the writing and of a failure to get
under the skin of language sufficiently for it to be roused out
of its ordinary demeanour:
I'm
frankly terrified of an ecological
armageddon. You seem bored with
the festivities and utterly finished
with the West. We left Australia
for an ancient culture. How
perturbed we are to discern
this country's gargantuan
industrialisation. I leer at the remnants
of the pungent cake. The West
has traded its soul for a few dollars. Will
China remember the Opium war or
keep eating the impossibly rich
sweets? Am I being simply
disrespectful? What
of it? Glaciers melt and, yes,
this autumn is hotter than summer. So
Capitalism won: the cadres swapped
their grey Mao-esque suits
for the latest Armani.
(The
Next Superpower)
This imaginative low-pressure area seems to affect the entire volume,
resulting in a language low on verbal texture, melopoeia and on forms
of figuration but high on ideological sentiment. All the boxes are ticked,
that is, against political answers which few of us would not, I trust,
tick ourselves. But one cannot but help feel that here is a kind of poetry
that is, by exposing racism and imperialism, victim, in the end, of that
desire to, as Marjorie Perloff says, "do cultural work."
Vivian Smith's Along the Line is a collection of carefully
crafted poems on clearly identifiable subjects such as the Australian
landscape, family, photograph albums, paintings and painters. Smith's
subjects frequently possess a suburban setting. The poems are distinguished
by a sharp visual sense, an informal voice, albeit occurring, often,
within a metrical form, and decorous, and often compressed, statement.
In 'The Colonial Poet' (an intentionally ambiguous setting
where Australia "this little outpost" points also back to
another poet in another time) Smith's artistic development is charted:
Gone the clumsiness of younger days,
the feelings too intense, the tone not right.
There was a bad patch in my middle years
when every line was swollen with disaster,
inflamed, intoxicated like my life …
It took me years to learn to use my eyes,
to see the way a fern cone stands unscrolled …
A language clear and pure as a thrush,
as clear as stones that interrupt a creek,
lines as strict and spare as summer hills
through which essentials speak.
Some of these sound like qualities espoused by British Movement poets
of the 1950s, in reaction to the inflated poetic currency of poets such
as Dylan Thomas. And, to some extent, this is a collection whose strengths
and limitations can be seen as similar to theirs. Though more varied
in subject matter and response than many of the Movement poets, the poet's
admission in 'Quiet Evening', where he refers to Pandora's
monsters, is, perhaps, an accurate comment on the poems in the collection:
I'm too controlled. I make them fly away.
It floods outside as if disaster's near.
I light a cigarette. I'm glad my mind's
so elegant, so various and clear.
The poems which seem to overcome these limitations are often the ones
where Smith suspends that Augustan predilection for neat summative statement
and allows the imagery to take on the burden of meaning, such as 'The
Edge of Winter':
Ferocity of parrots driven down
by early mountain snow to haunt our bay:
they tear apart the coral's crested flowers
and drink the sugars and the juice all day.
Such images of hunger strike our lives
the way that summer lightning rips the sky.
They scream and swoop and scatter flowers among
the other flowers they break with swivelled tongue-
like green velvet with unbuttoned eye.
Remember all that rain five years ago?
Books bred fungus, each wall its stain.
Our lives were kept indoors like animals
while boredom ate the protein in the brain.
And then one day the rain began to lift.
We went outside recalling summer skies.
The letter box half hanging from its hinge
was full of drowned and broken butterflies.
The title of Matthew Cooperman's book is a play upon
the word days. The collection, in fact, is not short on punning.
As witnessed by, for example:
There's a movement of foot
in this cuntry (well of loneliness).
A pyramid schemes for quiet.
You will always be blue
to my see.
The world's a cup some countries kick.
The emphasis is largely, as you might expect, upon language and how
it is involved in the assembling, not just representation, of reality.
The obsession with this assembling activity of language in some contemporary
Anglo-American poetry is often amusing to many non-Western writers familiar
with the ancient texts of philosopher/grammarians such as Bhartrhari
and Panini. Understandably, perhaps, because in the Indic intellectual
tradition, unlike in the Western, the linguistic effort determined the
philosophical and was never sundered from it. That said, any use of language
that brings about those effects we associate predominantly with poetry
is a use which draws attention to itself and, ipso facto, to language. However,
the obsession in the West, which has always had a rather compartmentalised
attitude towards knowledge, continues, producing poetry such as in Daze.
There is in the collection, perhaps as a result of its focus, a good
deal of sniping at Realism, at its "dreary precision". Though
why precision should distinguish Realism more than other aesthetic modes
is not clear. Certainly it is not a quality always in evidence in Daze:
You begin to show some changes. You see the
event from different
perspectives, why, just the other day, don't people for significance,
record "truth" immediately, mark instance what has happened
in
the world, and you keep only what is important to you …
When I want to say a name several try, channels
may compete, and
you get confused with other Johns or Janes we have, have we
not,
met? Or other names (head like a balloon) are free-floating
hows
and whys. Thus activated you may feel (surprisingly) I have
the
shape too as this process goes…
In forgetting I feel constantly, feel arbitrary
among similarities
(two streets for one body) working (at Main) with what it already
knows. Someone else looks out a window and sees the
Washington Monument. Automatically I'm convinced déjà vu,
but
you haven't. You forget why I went there too as you move into
the
room, when?
(From
the Corner of My)
Ford Madox Ford in his poem 'Views' (published in 1910
in Songs
From London) which parts of Cooperman's poem curiously
echo achieves, in contrast, a memorable demonstration of the
epistemological uncertainties encountered in perception and memory.
And while the often 'experimental' forms in Daze, frequently
incorporating discontinuity, ellipsis, opacity and alternating
discourses, seem consistent with a poetry which seeks to identify
and question the nature of experience, I was frequently left
with a feeling that experience is sacrificed in them to the god
of a, perhaps, false complexity. Complexity not lived-through,
not generated out of a core of suffering and joy, but strained
through a pale academicism. Such a complexity might well make
the less committed reader of contemporary poetry desert it for
a genre which can, whilst retaining clarity and objectivity of
utterance, still adequately deal with life.
There is certainly nothing in Jerry Harp's collection
(78 poems, each with a Creature in its title) to interfere with clarity
of utterance. Divided into four sections each coming with an epigraph
from Shakespeare, Milton, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, the poems
continue the saga of a character of 'postmodern alienation' (Wayne Miller)
begun in Harp's previous collection Creature. Creature
is continually at odds with his environment. His estrangement from
it, and nothing else, defines him:
My car goes up on the lift. My gaze drops to
the floor.
The mechanic gives me a look like I'm
The wrong make and model for this place.
(Creature
at the Garage)
The problem is that because Creature does not define
himself we get caught up in the poems in an endless cycle of reassertions
of alien-ness. They begin to sound the same. The repetitiveness
is etched in the syntax, which follows a singular pattern devoted to
observation or to reporting action but seldom to reflection. A Creature
so strange and un-self aware can only induce in the reader an impression
of someone affecting strangeness:
I am boredom crossed in mastication,
A script that awakens every morning half erased,
A patch torn off a piece of cloth.
I clothe myself in particles
Like berries mixed in mud.
I cull myself to bring a voice along.
A crowd of brooding liveries, a cast
Without a play, could you give me the time?
I adore you. I've forgotten my next line.
(Creature's
Morning Prayer 2)
I am reminded, when putting down this volume, of the pertinence of T.S.Eliot's
remarks concerning Romanticism: "What is permanent and good in
Romanticism is curiosity [… ] a curiosity which recognises
that any life, if accurately and profoundly penetrated,
is interesting and always strange. Romanticism is a short cut to the
strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back
upon themselves" (my italics):
[ … ] I go into the blazing light
Bum a cigarette, and walk to the corner
Sucking fire while the old dream returns
Of becoming a middle-brow hermeticist making
What comes from the leavings of my own mind.
I blow smoke. The sky clouds up again.
I grind the ashes under my shoe.
I spread into a mordant stain.
(Creature
at the Garage)
To continually fall back upon a self that is characterised by such low
levels of self-scrutiny is only to alienate the sympathy of the reader
and ensure that he or she quickly loses interest.
There is no lack of scrutiny in David Hamilton's debut
collection, Ossabaw. It is frequently a scrutiny of the lives of
others, or of the natural world. Hamilton, in both, is alive to
movement and change, and to pattern. In the opening poem the lines
move forward and, at the same time, backward in a hypnotic and unhurried
movement:
Think of grasses bending as the stream bends
Leaning against its sweep in from the margins
Holding on somewhere under as the tide gathers
Rising and falling to the wings of the heron
Pulling his old blue pleasure from one rill to another
Over grasses bending as the stream bends
Leaning against its sweep in from the margins
Where minnows worry a warp that softens
And the heron pulls his old blue pleasure
Over the long salty winding together
Of grasses bending as the stream bends
Leaning against its sweep in on a margin
Holding on somewhere under as the tide gathers
(Lovesong
from the Marshes)
This ability to repeat and yet not repeat lines lies at the heart of
what is best in this collection. Its most compelling poems are characterised
by, in one form or another, the presence of a pronounced repetition.
A repetition both in the acoustic properties of the poems, in the way
they weigh the relative duration and shape, as well as stress, of their
syllables and eek out a murmurous music among their echoing and half
rhyming sounds; and in longer poems, such as the title sequence 'Ossabaw',
in the way in which their repetition of objects creates motifs.
In 'Ossabaw' (name of a natural habitat) a fifteen
page poem often consisting of no more than eleven lines on a page, the
aforementioned combine to knit up a text where, at the slightest shift
of air, things move and are transplanted in space by other things. Here "thoughts" often
become "lost among filaments." In this 'natural' space,
however, the poet takes care not to impose himself: "I learn to
distribute my weight." In other poems, too, especially in 'Biege
and Avocada', 'Noctua', 'To a Later Autumn' and
the prose poems, the rewards of this principle are amply demonstrated.
All the poems in this collection, encompassing a wide range of forms,
exhibit elegance of mind and of form. They are the product of, as Hamilton
himself puts it in 'From a Journal' "my fine discriminations." The
collection, however, as a whole fails, I feel, to locate those
tensions, those cardinal areas in the poet's experience, which
might, if found, have welded its respective parts into something more
than that. Hopefully, perhaps, with Hamilton's next collection …
Copyright © Martin Anderson, 2007.
All quotations are copyright © the authors, 2006.
