Michael Brennan: The Imageless World
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 1-844710-05-X. 93pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, Pb, £8.95/$12.95).

Jerry Harp: Creature
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-844710-28-9. 98pp, pb, £8.95, $12.95.)

Peter Middleton: Aftermath
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-63-3. 173pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, Pb, £9.95/$13.95).

James Reiss: Riff on Six. New and Selected Poems.
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 1-844710-31-9. 165pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, pb, £9.95/$13.95).

Of these four recent offerings from the adventurous Salt Publishing, only The Imageless World
by Michael Brennan really stands out.

In the British poet Peter Middleton's collection Aftermath an energised intellection predominates:

The ratio of moving time
to industrial time
is sticky enough
for out of the body goings on,
like parliamentary consent,
or integration of the superego
several feet behind a laugh.

(from "Sacred Object Person Unknown")

A different species of attention is evident in The Imageless World by young Australian poet Michael
Brennan. The percentage of poems titled "Letter Home" or "Postcard" about 60% of the collection, suggests a personhood not so much on vacation as removed from its habitual mode of perception, and reporting from a topos which is temporally and spatially ambiguous. This ambiguousness produces poems of tantalising paradox, tenderness, and of resonant inscrutability. "Letter Home", on page 74, illustrates some of these qualities:

I am sitting in a room of seven thousand books
About a person I will never read.

I remember walking into the bathroom
Where she sat in luke warm water.

I wrote a postcard in the steam on the shower-glass
And began a book the next day

About a room with seven thousand memories
And only one image.

She was gone the day after.
Words fail me, where memory

Turns from words to things
To their images to words again.

She left a sliver of green soap
Which I started to use

The day after the day she left.
I tried to mail the postcard but

Without a forwarding address
Only the soap that was almost gone was left.

Yesterday, I walked into a room
Where seven thousand people sat

Inside the memory of an image of a room
Inside a book. I am almost alone reading.

When the soap dissolves,
When the book is finished,

And the image a memory
Of a room on a postcard

From a country we talked of,
She will walk in.

Brennan is a poet who seems at home both in the long, almost prose length, line and in the very short line. He has a deft ear attuned to the weightings of individual words, and of silence, and his poems frequently convey a more than usually heightened awareness of how tentatively, often, language decodes and explores experience – such experience, itself, being intimately enfolded within the language used to reify it:

We are caught

on mild currents
of recollection
that lift us higher,

as though world
was residue, not
imperceptible

loss,
a moment
that draws away.

There is nothing
here, a century,
habit forming

forgetfulness.
Time between
moment &

word, space
where an image
might form.

A rain of ash,
curve of a rib'
the Vistula,

a sea of hair, perspex,
a warehouse
of cases, chalked

name, age, date.
A single blond
braid cut close

to the scalp.
Walls of faces, dead
bracketed by dates.

What do I know, not
knowing how to forget,
how to begin to remember.

(From "The Imageless World").

Elsewhere, in "Ellipses", Brennan acknowledges this enfolding explicitly: "Filling space with words,
occasionally we touch.” And in "Letter Home" (page 55): "And all the drifting friendship continues,
/A series of letters forming each other,//Gifts stolen and returned changed,/The impossible words we become."

Brennan's world is a world that we receive news of in an impressive variety of forms; a world which frequently manifests itself in a language of epistemological uncertainty. Brennan, however, avoids that modish, but irritating, stance of some contemporary poets writing in English whose concern, too, is with the centrality of language in our lives. Poets who write a poetry which is anti-capitalistic in its orientation but which, paradoxically, strains the vexed relationship between literary text and external world even further than the poetry of the elitist and conservative High Modernist poets to whose work they are, in principle, so firmly opposed. Brennan's poems, despite their authentic probing of the chiasm of language and experience, arrive at genuinely moving insights into his own, and others', lives. No poet of the High Modernist mode would have been so immune to the principles of good writing, though, that they would have written

  the broken fragments of a fugue.
or
  the dusk grew dim.

as the American poet Jerry Harp, in his collection Creature, does. I shan't labour the obvious, despite the "broken fragments" phrase having survived the drowsy editors not only of Salt, but Verse, ND reView, and, yes, The Best Verse: Ten Years of Poetry (though if it isn't, as these publications seem to suggest, obvious, then perhaps poetry today needs to return to the dictum of Ford Madox Ford that poetry should be as well written as prose) except to say that – since perception provides the crucial data upon which all our knowledge and understanding of the world rests – if a text is so careless at this level it is doubtful whether it can hope to convince at the level of speculation. Sadly, this is true of the majority of poems here, many of which would not survive a rigorous creative writing workshop's critiquing. Too many of the poems in the first part of the collection have as much rhythmical life as a cadaver. The voice, from which all expressive resources of syntax seem to have been purged, imparts to the reader a tone suggestive, in its monotony, of nothing more elevated than a catalogue. Although the poems in the early parts of the second section of "Creature" begin to redress this, hovering between free and regular verse in that manner so effectively employed by the American poet Donald Justice, whose encomium appears on the cover and to whom Harp includes a homage poem, they soon become the victims of a predictably outré manner of imaging and phrasing:

I wore my failure like a bandoleer,
Pinned my pink slip to the wall,
And closed my throat, a stopped-up drain. (sic)

She hammered at me with iron gloves...

I answered her like a chipped brick wall

Harp's Creature begins to seem, more than anything else, a pose. One cannot help, in reading this book, but summon other marginalised presences within the urban phantasmagoria such as those of James Wright and John Berryman. Harp's Creature withers, in comparison, to a highly self-conscious and manufactured identity; hatched, it feels, more in the comfort of a drawing or senior common room than in the deracinated imagination of a suffering subject.

Eventually the poems begin to descend into the banal: "Here is what I take with me; it's there/when I arrive." And, most unforgivably, the trivial:

Waiting for my steak to come, I sit
Surrounded by mounds of fruit.
The teenage daughter of a family
Two tables away looks up. Caught
In the sunlight's fingers, her flash of smile

Sinks my heart. Smoothing back
My hair, I look away abashed.
Could this creature find the Creature good
To see? I taste myself tasting
Strawberries that bite into my tongue.

I can't catch my breath.
A toddler runs by screaming.
I want to run into the parking lot, into
The sun, and hide. She's far too young for Creature.
I think the father throws suspicion toward me.

The waitress brings my meat,
Which I cast my face into as the blood
Spills on my plate, and I come to myself
Groaning while I chew and slice.
By the time I look up again,

The lovely creature has gone,
Taking all her people with her.
I don't have the heart for pie. I scrape
My bill together and rush outside to walk
The busy streets, forgetting who I am.

("Creature on the Town")

The American poet James Reiss's Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems is gathered from as far back as the seventies. A good number of the poems in the selections from the 1970s and 80s deal with childhood and family within the setting of a Jewish central European New York neighbourhood. It is within these concerns that Reiss's poems, sharply intimate in detail and executed with an ease of tone, are at their strongest and most moving. They contain vignettes, often, of poignancy and sadness, such as "A Corner Store in Washington Heights", which are imbued with feelings of affection for a generation such as his father's, of immigrants "who arrived in this city in rag shirts".

The closer the selection approaches 2000, though, the more the spark and spring go out of the poems. All the strong poems, and there are enough to recommend reading these volumes, [The Breathers (1974); Express (1983); & The Parable of Fire (1996)] lie between the pages of the less recent past. "The Postcard" from The Breathers, carries within it that sensitivity to, and empathy for, other lives which never descends into mere mawkishness in Reiss, and within which there exists the recognition of that intense spatial and temporal loneliness one associates with the American psyche:

The summer Barbara gave birth I received a post
card from someone I'd never heard of, Mrs Sidney Burns,
postmarked August 4th from someplace I'd never heard of in Iowa.
In a shaky third-grade script these words were pencilled:

"have bin thinkin of you how do you like all this winter
now you think of me once in a wile mr.reece what will
become of the ice house
                              mrs. sidney burns"

On the back a cheap imitation of a Currier
and Ives Christmas scene: by a tiny road a gingerbread
farmhouse in the snow with long
icicles hanging from the roof over the windows
and the faintest outline of a woman's face in one window behind
the curtain of icicles, as though someone
had penciled it in and then decided to erase it.

 

Copyright © Martin Anderson, 2004.