Shearsman 55

Tony Frazer

 

Books received, recommended & otherwise noteworthy (2)

John Levy: Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs
(tel-let, Charleston, IL., 2003. 16pp, A4 chapbook, no price listed.)

It's a real pleasure to see another publication by John Levy, the first, I think, in many years. John was a contributing editor to the first series of Shearsman but has been harder to find as a poet since he became a full-time lawyer in his native USA. The good news is the poetry's still there, less minimalist than it was (notwithstanding publication by tel-let, home from home for America's minimalist poets), but still admirable:

Betrayal

as if you were flat, a
tray, to be a tray, to be
heaped unexpectedly
with hurt

and how the hurt remains, as if
the tray doesn't ever
get tilted, is carried level and
nothing spills off

Christopher Logue: All Day Permanent Red (War Music continued)
(Faber, London, 2003. 39pp, pb, £8.95).

Logue's ongoing version of Homer's Iliad doesn't really need my imprimatur, given the praise it seems to have garnered in all quarters, but I'm delighted he's still doing it. This makes a good pendant volume to the collected War Music that Faber issued last year, which finally gathered all of Logue's Homer between one set of covers. This volume is a most welcome addition to the project, though the price-per-page is more than a little excessive.

Mark McMorris: The Blaze of the Poui
(University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA., & London, 2003. ISBN 0-8203-2515-5, 73pp, pb, $16).

The Poui is a tree native to the Caribbean. Mark McMorris is an American poet of Jamaican (?) origin and the author of some other collections I've not seen, one of them from this same publisher. He teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I was most impressed by his reading at this year's CCCP weekend in Cambridge and acquired this book as a consequence.

While his subject matter deals with black history in the New World, the colonial past, and his native Caribbean, there is an interesting subversion of expectations. There is a luxuriance to McMorris' diction, and an ease with sound and rhythm that well support his longer poems, and there's an ease with older rhythms and a magpie's view of language that lends delight:

Time Once Again

Let there be time like the turn of a golden orrery
Al Cook

Let there be time for the fields to redeem
the caulked keels and cracked ankles
of slaves dead in seven years of turning
and let the houses topple as the body topples
time's spinning like the turn of the golden orrery
Let there be poetry like an alphabet cut from iron
manacling the pen to paper and to my flesh
to print marks like gashes in time's sleeve
empty in hot sunlight, with the bodies turning
into earth, and earth into fury, in time's comedy.

Or

I heard many breathings in my time, but few forms
encrust the hesitation of surfaces and sound
and the closer I went, the more I mistook the desire
of things, to be as in the light, to stay upon the earth
as a fertile father, as a cycle of birth pangs—
to stay a little longer under the sun, than the sun
[…]

(opening of Blossoms, the first poem in the Breath Forms sequence).

This is a rich collection of fine poems from a talented young poet, whom I shall continue to track.

Leo Mellor & Alistair Noon: Ground Detail
(Gecko Press, Berlin, 2003. 20pp, chapbook, £3. Available from Leo Mellor, 621 King's College, Cambridge CB2 1ST).

A first showing I think for Alistair Noon, second for Leo Mellor after his Salt joint-venture with Sophie Levy last year. This shows both poets growing in confidence and beginning to attain an individual voice. I've enjoyed this one.

Here's Leo Mellor in The fade lock:

… The ripple of cobbles relaid. Shine plumage for

folded hands. By morning nouns curdle, fall to ready rust
& dew, bearing cases in the brambles over & over, every

detail catches your attention, as it should. A part amid us
hunts the vale, the fold & alone on the side. Track then wood

lose out to thin leaves forcing through ballast, shaken to reveal a root
system, wonder on …

and Alistair Noon in Wilderness :

[...]

a horn, harsh
as bark;

and an engine
in the constant wind:

there's a saw,
icy as a stream;

and a drill, white
as the sun;

[...]

Jennifer Moxley: The Sense Record
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-93-5. 93pp, pb, £8.95).

This is Shearsman Book of the Month for May 2003, and the full review can be found here.

 

Peter Robinson: Selected Poems 1976-2001
(Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2003. ISBN 1-85754-625-3. 139pp, pb, £8.85.)

Peter Robinson's career trajectory has been slightly odd, in so far as he first came to notice at the time of editing the excellent little magazine Perfect Bound from Cambridge in the late 1970s, as well as running the Cambridge Poetry Festival. What's odd about that? Nothing, except that PB was, along with Grosseteste Review, the finest exponent of contemporary non-mainstream British poetry at the time, and Robinson's own poetry has seemed at odds with that background ever since.

This book surveys an interesting career then, the work of a poet who goes his own way and the hell with what anyone else thinks, has found his niche, his style and has grown comfortable with it, but not so comfortable that he's forgotten how to write good poems. It's fair to say, I think, that he would not now have much interest in the further reaches of what passes for innovative poetry in this country, but he has an undeniable interest in poets such as Roy Fisher — on whom he has written illuminatingly, and whom he interviewed for my edition of Fisher's Interviews Through Time (2000) — which indicates that one should not make facile assumptions, particularly concerning someone who spends most of his time outside the UK (he works in Japan, and passes much time in Italy, his wife's home), and thus participates in the literary swim here at something of a distance, if at all. The fact is that his work never sought to break down barriers, was always honest unto itself, and was from the very beginning elegant and well-written – as is demonstrated here by the poems from the Many Press volume Overdrawn Account (1980). Part 2 here shows Robinson getting into his stride, with the beautifully taut A Short History and other poems of memory and family background, as well as the nigh-unbearable poems that deal with the assault on his then-girlfriend, with their despair and helplessness.

His newer poems are reflections of a life, in Japan, in the UK and in Italy, snatches of family conversation, of meetings with friends, reflections on landscape and fleeting impressions of transient moments caught on the wing.

Apropos of Nothing

Words spoken now to please the dead
are dandelion pollen in this late air.
They roll down a riverbank there
like balls of fluff from under a bed,
words spoken now to please the dead.

The forever dead who don't go beyond,
cross border, boundary or frontier
but in our old thoughts remain here,
they reach towards us with each frond,
the forever dead who don't go beyond.

They're the more living, being said,
as a fresh wind makes aired jackets dance
passionate tangos on a balcony's lines.
Words spoken now to please the dead
commemorate us living, being said.

This is a recent, uncollected poem and demonstrates the best of Robinson's later work, tight lines, not a word out of place, not a word too many in the whole poem, and a fine closing riff. This is a book of many pleasures, if quieter pleasures than most that I find these days. It's good to be confounded, to be knocked out of one's preconceptions, and Robinson's work, in its understated way, does that for me. A book worth having even if you already have many of the earlier volumes, as the uncollected and long-out-of-print material here adds greatly to the overall picture.

Gershom Scholem: The Fullness of Time. Poems.
(Translated from the German by Richard Sieburth. Introduced and annotated by Steven M. Wasserstrom. Ibis Editions, Jerusalem, 2003. Distributed by SPD. ISBN 965-90125-3-5, 155pp, pb, $13.95).

I've admired the Ibis Editions list for some time, and this is another welcome addition to it. I have to say though, that I don't think much of the poems, even though the translations are very good indeed. I had not in fact realised that Scholem wrote poetry, and it's fair to say that it's a minor part of his literary legacy. Scholem (1897-1982) was a scholar of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, and a close friend of Walter Benjamin, who is the addressee of a group of poems in this selected volume. He lived in Jerusalem from 1923 onwards. The book has a good introduction and thorough notes, and should interest anyone intrigued by Scholem's scholarly work, not that I've seen much of it on the shelves of bookstores in the UK. (By contrast, there seem to be dozens of paperbacks of Scholem in German bookstores.)

Aharon Shabtai: J'accuse
(New Directions, New York, 2003. Translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. ISBN 0-8112-1539-3. 65pp, pb, $14.95).

This is the second collection of Shabtai's poetry to be translated by Peter Cole; the (very fine) first one was Love and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, 1997). These poems date from 1996-2002, starting from the accession to power in Israel of Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party, thus covering the entire period of the second intifada. They are poems of rage, railing against the political situation in Israel and the occupied territories, and were published in the weekly editions of newspapers.

There are somewhat hors de concours then as review material, but it has to be said that their power is sustained even without the news items that triggered their composition. Some of them are frankly so direct as to be scarcely poems, while others have a snarling, riveting power that still show the white heat of creation:

Rosh HaShanah

Even after the murder
of the child Muhammad on Rosh HaShanah,
the paper didn't go black.
In the same water in which the snipers
wash their uniforms,
I prepare my pasta,
and over it pour
olive oil in which I've browned
pine nuts,
which I cooked for two minutes with dried tomatoes,
crushed garlic, and a tablespoon of basil.
As I eat, the learned minister of foreign affairs
and public security
appears on the screen,
and when he's done
I write this poem.
For that's how it's always been —
the murderers murder,
the intellectuals make it palatable,
and the poet sings.

This is a voice that will be heard when the newspapers in which these poems first appeared have long turned to dust; the raw contempt, the anger will long be audible, an angry echo on the desert winds. Long live the poet.

Robert Sheppard: The Lores
(Reality Street Editions, London, 2003. 88pp, pb, £7.50. ISBN 1-874400-23-7.)

We still lack a clear view of Sheppard's work, despite solid support over the years from publishers such as Stride and Reality Street. One of the problems is the sheer scope of his work, and the fact that he spent several years assembling an extended poem entitled Twentieth-Century Blues, which is not a blues, but which was completed before the end of the century. Several parts of this have appeared as individual collections; some have turned up in magazines; but the whole is still unclear, at least to this reader. The Lores is in fact a part of this vast project, and is stated to be part 3 of The Flashlight Sonata (some of which Stride has published under that title) and part 30 (sic) of 20C Blues.

Some of this work is rooted in contemporary literary theory, and some of it owes its mode of expression to French and transatlantic styles of radical poetry, in which syntax is disrupted and startling conjunctions occur. Less rebarbative than the work of a Prynne or a Wilkinson, this is still poetry of great difficulty. It is a poetry that engages with varied forms of discourse in an attempt to free its surface from the shackles of poetic convention. The argument is that certain (implicitly undesirable) power centres in the modern world are intimately related to certain accepted styles of discourse – and this is in tune with the post-structuralist theory that still seems to have substantial currency both here and in the US. The text is therefore locked into a (terminal?) level of distrust, looking forward in time with a jaundiced eye, looking back into a despised recent past and contemplating a compromised present. Voices cut through unannounced, unnamed, their words caught on the wing in an overcrowded street, and mix with third-party words delivered by heads on a screen and snippets of texts, varying from newspapers to learned tomes. What this certainly is not, is poetic in any conventional sense. Book 3 opens thus:-

Counterpoint 80s speculation against the
clamping gape takes us whole
through collisions of semantic torques
twists on the page saddle
us to a fiery buck
assertively thrusting those isolate recognitions
(against the credit's opening testimony)

They artificialise the public discussion
of our care-history subject
matter matters banging a jot
calculations shed household debt texts
recant the radical journalist's daily
record of his angelic working
out (stag night pollution elsewhere

It is an overtly political poetry that abjures accepted political delivery, and thus perhaps subverts itself in the process. It is however a fascinating book, and my impression of it is that it does stand effectively on its own, apart from the vast 20C Blues edifice. Will we ever see the whole thing?

George Stanley: A Tall Serious Girl. Selected Poems 1957-2000.
(Qua Books, Jamestown, RI, USA, 2003. Edited by Kevin Davies & Larry Fagin. 222pp, hardcover, ISBN 0-9708763-2-7. $25. Limited signed edition ISBN 0-9708763-3-5 $100).

This is Shearsman Book of the Month for June 2003. Read the long appreciation of it here.

John Temple: Collected Poems
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-56-0. 176pp, pb, £9.95, $13.95).

Salt's list has been thoroughly unpredictable so far, but the scope of the project is becoming clearer: a number of younger Australian poets, ditto Americans, plus an odd mix of UK small-press poets who lacked publishers willing to do large collections. Then there are the neglected figures, John Temple being one, though it's probably fair to say that he opted out rather than was forgotten, per se. Temple's name cropped up regularly in the 60s and early 70s in all the places that, with retrospect, one would have liked to have been seen:

The English Intelligencer, Wivenhoe Park Review (later The Park), Ferry Press etc etc. Apart from the occasional small collection, though, there has been no full-scale book until this Collected. The result? A pleasant and diverting book which won't rewrite the history books, but which fills a gap worth plugging, nonetheless. The style tends towards the mid-60s American, an infectious style that is at least one of the better ones to adopt, if one is searching for a non-traditional mode of expression.

John Tranter: Studio Moon
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 114pp, pb, £8.95 / $12.95).

Tranter's is anything but a predictable style, and this book is predictable only in the extent of its unpredictability. It collects work from throughout the 1990s and the first couple of years of the new millennium; some of this work nods towards the New York School, as one would expect (name-checks for Ashbery and O'Hara come early in the book), but some of it also plays with work by other poets, classical and modern, translating them, imitating them, replying to them. There are the usual diverting Tranter poems but also hard-edged commentaries, and a restless virtuoso use of form, as in Dark Harvest:

[...] I'm nursing a drink at twilight,
looking up at the thunderheads lit from below:
      everything's blowing

into the future that waits for us but doesn't want us,
nor the children, who await their change of faith,
or so I guess, staring down on the late avenues
     crowded with feelings.

Unusual for much contemporary poetry is Tranter's ease with narrative – it's something Australian poets (mainstream or otherwise) seem comfortable with, and that Brits seem unable to do, mistrusting it, maybe. A case in point here is the splendid Opus Dei, about a preacher colliding with modern life, but not suggestive of the Catholic organisation of the same name. The sheer range of work in this volume makes it difficult to deal with in a short review; suffice it to say that this is the best collection by Tranter in some time and that you should own a copy.

Lawrence Upton: Wire Sculptures
(Reality Street Editions, London, 2003. 44pp, pb, £5. ISBN 1-874400-24-5.)

Upton's work crosses a number of boundaries, which makes classification difficult; to which one should also say that classification is an irrelevance and that one should simply deal with the work at hand. What we have here is textual work organised in a form that one would normally describe as 'poetry', or perhaps as narrative shards. That said, the material is confusing in many ways, and perhaps resistant to interpretation. I had wondered if there were some performance element to this, but I've seen comments by the author somewhere that these texts should be read (by himself) with the minimum of gesture and 'theatre', which suggests that they are to be seen primarily as texts upon the page.

I think one should also see them as an interlocking sequence where each segment builds to an impression of the whole. Some of the more fragmentary pieces do seem to refuse to take part, however, while some of the more discursive pieces open out in delightful sequences of lines:

these words float
not cushions
not pillows
downy bulbous
but angels

(from East Croydon)

and thus perhaps the words are suspended in space as wire sculptures, as mobiles are. I don't get it all, but I like large chunks of this. Even if for the wrong reasons?

Copyright © Shearsman Books, 2003.
The copyright in all quotations is held by the authors, or their estates. There are many additional reviews here, not included in the print version of this issue, which only had space for shortened versions of the reviews of Jennifer Moxley, Peter Robinson and George Stanley.