Peter Dent: Adversaria

(Stride, Exeter, 2004. ISBN 1-900152-97-5. 50pp, pb, £5.95)

Sheila Murphy: Proof of Silhouettes

(Stride, Exeter, 2004. ISBN 1-900152-93-2. 114pp, pb, £8.50)

Adversaria and Proof of Silhouettes are two very different personal pieces with the act of writing at core; neither is likely to entertain a reader unprepared for engagement and creative reflection. Both poets write with considerable composure, intellect and craftsmanship which is to be admired. But, as with much exploratory modern poetry (post Barthes' 'Death of the Author'), it's difficult not to conclude that there are times when the creative demands on the reader can easily equal or outweigh those on the writer.

We embark on a voyage through self-analytical, self-conscious consciousness; personal and public referents become 'jumbled'; criticism, doubt and the artifice of writing are foregrounded as signifiers go in search of their signifieds. For Dent and Murphy their 'chaos' is not ideological, they're not examining dominant thought/belief structures that create meaning but challenge thought with expressive form. You'll find no cultural reductio outside the self, though many of the poems, as constructs, do test ways to interpret, reflect upon and semantically arrange sentient, emotional and intellectual experience.

Peter Dent's Adversaria comprises forty twelve line poems written over a period of three months. Each is constructed, not so much from sentence units as word groupings which function more on the model of intricate waterway than nexus with meaning ebbing back and forth and leaking across poems and throughout the body of the work, as in 'Perception' with its embedded riddle:

New seasonal light   to freshen up   my
First is in improbable   clues come last

Perpetuum immobile   like the man says
Softly   Hamlet clamouring on the roof

At moonlight and a dozen lonely things
Which state's unenvious of   looks on

With a cheshire smile   says who goes
Easy there? ....

The opening two lines: the semantic unit, delineated by space according to rhythm, conveys both direct and indirect meaning. For instance linear meaning may stop at any space divide or continue from one unit to the next, or flow on by implication through ellipsis. Alternatively, linear meaning could terminate with 'my' plus whatever implication or with 'First' plus implication on the next line; if the second, and both are possible/present, then 'First' becomes shared with both preceding and succeeding structures — this is only one example, as can be seen, of what's happening all the time in the poem, and throughout the work, that separation can and will occur even within units of meaning.

Dent's technique is precise, demanding but above all functions to present a shifting tenuous reality as it slips through the mind's fingers. His writing is intensely personal and a personal response on the part of the reader is not only justified but what's demanded, as a poem such as 'Semblances' indicates:

So you'll keep a good eye on proceedings
The dartboard   minus rings   decentres

But I'm feeling queasy watching the wind
This way and that   does nothing change

When someone makes it up?   no effort
To the daily sport   his narrative's ready

To clarify not simply news but a life-long
Fantasy with truth true flight it's over

The next page   plus another waiting in
Arrears   here's present and correct   for

Introduction the temporary confinement
His best light's true to form   leaps out

 

Proof of Silhouettes offers another sometimes intangible world filtered through the innovative, playful intellect of Sheila E Murphy; a world constructed out of reflection and careful deliberation. Although I found the book a little uneven, where exuberance and pleasure in the act of writing in the earlier part seemed to overcome restraint, I did enjoy many of the later pieces which demonstrated for me far greater craftsmanship and overall control. Word choice too created problems, causing language to function as barrier rather than gateway — a playful alienation maybe but somehow failing to satisfy. Compare the opening of two of her earlier prose poems:

The dim equestrian motet surrendered evidentiary habitat.

from 'After Chaperone' and

Serene quill imitates a hairline fracture formidable quiescence
logarithmic in its wafer filo normative esprit confounding tilled heat.

from 'Conformity' with the openings of 'Standing Back' and 'On Sunlight', two poems later in the book,

Faults give way to heresy.

and

Emotions live the lives of nouns, semi-detached

also with the simple of drama of 'A Shift in Weather'

The mother heard her priest declare: the closer one grows to the deity,
the more intense the level of conversation.

and the tautly crafted

Time and against the granular induction chevrons placed their
amber laves where chipped rock seemed intact.

the opening to 'Aggravated Asphalt'.

Her facility for aphorism is matched by her originality in the creation of the almost post-it-note haiku which she has perfected to comment on or consummate certain of her prose poems:

Lip gloss painted on a flower, some cake (Empath)

Small evidence of having lived, the spoils of trees,
stilled laughter (Soft Percussion)

Shift in the weather, spot checking surfaces of fabric,
a quiet Sunday (A Shift in Weather)

Playfulness and joy of language are apparent throughout in the invention of neologisms, lexicalisations and in a rhythmical delight, no more so than in this opening stanza from 'What a Sweet Strong'':

what a sweet strong swaysy prong
to factor with
to filter
and to long

and her gentle e.e.cummings-type typography/wit in 'the or y'

post this. e
qual
qual
ms
border o
n v or ac i o us
tinkering .
that s it.

Separate from a very intimate and personal world there is much to admire in her social observations in poems such as 'Nary a Ration' and here in 'Self Similarity':

The Julia set conforms to inner Julia I would have to guess
And de rigeur endorsements fail to stymie
Onlookers with broccoli in their teeth
Rejoicing at the wit of inlaid selves, comprende?

But as she concedes in 'Untitled':

The thing I most enjoy about experience is what precedes it and what follows, the indelible presumption of the same.

That the consideration, dissection of anticipated and past experience are her real joy, not its directly felt counterpart or 'unfiltered' reconstruction, an approach which fashions Proof of Silhouettes into a work of (pre)meditation, afterthought and gentle judgement, spiced with wit and a salivating enjoyment for words.

Copyright © John Couth, 2004.
All quotations here are copyright © 2004 by Peter Dent and Sheila Murphy, respectively.