Shearsman 61: Short Reviews

Shearsman 61

Tony Frazer

Short Reviews

These notices (and those on subsequent pages) have taken some considerable time to appear, for which
I apologise to all concerned. We should be back up to date with issue 62.

Richard Burns: For the Living. Selected Writings 1: Longer Poems 1965-2000 (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004. 162pp, paperback, £10.99 / $16.99, ISBN 1-876857-90-0).

Since I provided a blurb for this book, perhaps I might be regarded as a biased commentator. I am, and I won't apologise for it. It includes all my favourite longer poems by this author: 'Avebury', 'Black Light', 'Tree', 'Croft Woods', and many more fine poems besides. The subtitle suggests that this is the first of several and I hope that's true: Burns is a fine poet who has not really had his due in the UK, perhaps because of his wanderings in foreign lands. It's high time he had some attention, and this surely is the book that will attract it. Highly recommended.

Allen Fisher: Gravity (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004. 281pp, paperback, £13.99 / $20.99, ISBN 1-844710-34-3); Entanglement (The Gig, Willowdale, Ont., Canada. 288pp, paperback, £15/€22/$20/C$25. ISBN0-9735875-0-4).

For years Allen Fisher was something of a mystery to the reading public. If you knew how, it was possible to get hold of short-run small press editions of parts of his long works. Often they went out of print quickly. Confusingly, some announced that they were only drafts anyway and were subject to further revision. There was an intermittent magazine called Spanner, which still appears occasionally.

On top of that Fisher is an art historian and thus comes to poetry from a different aesthetic background than most. Not surprisingly, the results are startlingly different, but ut has been hard to grasp for the simple reason that the books just weren't there. Whether the poet was reticent about collecting his work, I don't know, but, for all that, here we have the whole of the long-awaited Gravity as a consequence of shape project, spread across two volumes from two different publishers. The other long work, Place, is to appear from Reality Street Editions in mid-2005, which will enable us to see the oeuvre entire at long last.

I'm not actually going to attempt a review of these books, as they demand resources I just don't possess. Their approach is processual, but the process does not begin at A and proceed to B. The whole may be made up of various snapshots built up into an overlapping whole, and indeed, the whole may have holes in it. Gravity holds it all down, or together, but the whole whirls apart when gravity is withdrawn, leaving a (worm?)hole. The linguistic resources are also not your usual poetic run-of-the-mill and might indeed be regarded as unpoetic in some quarters. Fisher's diction is often grounded in science, and his project, his process, has no easily definable description, no solution or completion. Like many a long poem from the 20th Century, these works try to engage with the exterior world in a radically different manner. Like many a long poem from that century, you, the reader, will have to abandon your preconceptions of what a poem is, and of how to read it. You will have to start from scratch and find your own way; it's difficult, there's no doubt of that. It's worth it: there may be doubt of that in some quarters, but not in mine. I'm delighted with these books, although I am still finding my way.

Peter Gizzi: Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT., 2003. 99pp, paperback, $13.95, ISBN 0-8195-6664-0).

The author's third collection, this book was one of the best books to turn up in my mailbox during 2004. For some reason, it caught me off guard — I had not expected such a strong lyric voice. Perhaps it had been too long since I'd read his work. Lyric may well be his strongest suit, but there is a degree of compression to this work that puts it on another plane entirely. But on this other plane there is a quite unearthly beauty, and beauty, alas, is something that often goes missing altogether in non-mainstream poetry, whether in the US or the UK. Some might argue with my assumption there, but I'll keep it entirely subjective. There's not enough beauty around, and I'd like more of it.

The book opens with a sequence of poems, not dependent on one another, called 'A History of the Lyric', which carries a cryptic epigraph from that master of sonority and poetic beauty, W.S. Graham. The first poem 'Objects in mirror are closer than they appear' carries lovely observations such as these:

The white curled backs
of snapshots tucked in a frame

eyes of the dead

& the close:

they are closer than comfort
close than night breaking

over the mountain face

empurpled, its silhouette
ragged, silver

unquantifiable in pixie dusk

*

closer than power lines
lasting shadows on brush

breath, heart ticking
the prepared delay

as twilight settles
in waves and crests

a water fowl, hooded owl

*

an avant-garde
a backward glance

Elsewhere, the poem 'In the garden' begins thus:

Lateness is a dark and luminous thing
so true of early twilight.

I have known the morning to be darkest
upon waking. The pictures go away

and one is back to the thing of living.
Things to handle and attend:

Hawthorne, willow spear.

I could just sit back, sigh, and say "that's beautiful", and it is, but these poems offer not just a surface; there's a busy intellect too — the reader is offered perceptions and experiences transmogrified by language, which is as it should be. The poems seem to be simple, but are not; caught up in that beautiful surface it is all too easy to assume that meaning has arrived, but it's not quite like that: there's an obliqueness to these lyrics which is very much of its time, and there's a style to these poems which represents a challenge to the easy assumptions of what constitutes (a) lyric poetry (b) mainstream poetry or (c) non-mainstream poetry. In the USA, polarised as it sometimes seems to be between the post-Language school and the neo-formalists, things are not quite so simple. If you just remember that those two wings are the ones who are loud, that may be why you're hearing them. Tune your ears differently and you'll pick up a whole range of other voices who offer a genuine alternative, a vision for the future as I hope it might be: poets like Peter Gizzi, Peter Cole, Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright have all found new ways of saying things that need to be said in a changing world and have managed to do so while still using language as a vehicle of communication and, indeed, rapture. Perhaps the key to the book, if there is one, lies in the sequence 'Masters of the Cante Jondo' (cante jondo = 'deep song', a reference to García Lorca), with its gesture towards song, towards a buried tradition, and a sensual otherness. There is a sensuality to this book in which the reader can revel. It is a quite startling achievement. I am only scratching at the surface of its wonders in this short note: go and buy it!

Jesse Glass (ed): Ahadada Reader 1 (Ahadada Books, 3158 Bentworth Drive, Burlington, Ont., Canada L7M 1M2. ISBN 0-9732233-3-2. Distributed in the UK by West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN. 85pp, paperback, £7.50).

This anthology / reader carries the byline "experimental poems", and the description is pretty accurate. the poets featured are Canadian John Byrum and Brits Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk. Halsey's extraordinary full range is on show here, from his playful 'Lives of the Poets', with its cod-antiquarianism, to his co-option of financial market terminology as an alienation exercise. One of his visual pieces is on the cover. John Byrum's work uses the full panoply of tricks of visual poetry, and Geraldine Monk's poems here display her typical luxuriant fragmentation, letters and phrases cascading artfully across the page. Well worth your time, and I wonder what number 2 will have to offer...

Tom Pickard: The Dark Months of May (Flood Editions, Chicago, 2004. 68pp, paperback, $12.95, ISBN 0-9746902-2-8).

I've been reading Pickard's work for a good 35 years, having started with his two early Fulcrum Press volumes, which contained some terrific work by a young man just finding his voice and gaining encouragement from Bunting's avuncular presence in his native north-east. Notwithstanding the occasional interesting prose book since then, such as Guttersnipe, his work seemed to have lost its way somewhat, culminating in the rather weak volume Fuckwind some four years ago. This book shows considerable improvement and is beautifully designed and printed, as is the norm for Flood Editions. There are still a number of rather inconsequential lyrics in the book, as there were in the previous volume, but there are more ambitious pieces too, which indicate that something is stirring. There are also poems which show more care for the use of language than had been usual for this poet in recent times. The 'Self-Abstracting Poem' is a case in point which begins

a breeze of rowan lifts
pale curtains of cloud
where hawks stake a claim
to a drifter's sky

and ends

scuffing gushes
over lush mist
that skulk cloughs

while swift streams
skim speech
from streets of the sea

The pieces towards the end of the book, 'Fragments from an Archaeological Dig in Gallowgate' and 'The Ballad of Jamie Allan', show Pickard reaching for different sources of inspiration and benefiting from it. The first is mostly prose, spare poetic prose, that uses the different levels of excavation as a springboard for an elegiac look at history in Newcastle, whereas the latter is a short rip-roaring ballad that at first looks out of place, but it's so well done that no-one could deny it room here.

A book worth reading and, just maybe, the poet's back on form — not entirely, but the signs are good.

Peter Riley: Excavations (Reality Street Editions, Hastings, 2004. 216pp, paperback, £9, ISBN 1-874400-26-1).

The first half of this book, in an earlier version, appeared from the same press as Distant Points ten years ago. It's taken a while, but we can now finally see the whole sequence of 181 prose poems under one set of covers. It's a very original piece of work, being built on the bones of Victorian-era excavation reports of burial mounds. The mix of source material and authorial intervention make for unexpected conjunctions, startling shafts of light in amongst these old barrows. These are prose-poems of a kind, more in their openness than anything else, and it's a fine volume.

Jerome Rothenberg: Writing Through: Translations and Variations (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT., 2004. 240pp, paperback, $24.95, ISBN 0-8195-6588-1; $65 unjacketed cloth, ISBN 0-8195-6587-3).

Rothenberg, now in his seventies, has been a fixture on the US poetry scene for several decades, as poet, as translator, as promoter of ethnopoetics, and as anthologist. This book gives some idea of his explorations and is a splendid survey. It begins with his first significant venture, the then pioneering New Young German Poets, which presented figures such as Celan, Bachmann, Heissenbüttel and Enzensberger to the American public for the first time. then there are the Dada poets, Lorca, Neruda, Huidobro, Schwitters and Picasso, a tour of some of the monuments of the pre-war avant-garde, none of which had much been seen in English when he engaged with him.

The ethnopoetics side of his work is well represented with excerpts from the seminal volume Technicians of the Sacred, including the work of saints (Francis of Assisi), African tribespeople, Inuits, Native Americans and so forth — holy men, shamans, tribal singers, work from traditions totally alien to Western written poetry, and fascinating. Also included are poems that have their roots in non-anglophone work, but are further removed from the originals — in some cases texts that use only ghosts of the original to get where they are. The whole book makes for fascinating reading and is a worthy salute to one of the USA's 20-century literary pioneers.

Robert Saxton: Manganese (Carcanet, Manchester, 2003. 132pp, paperback, £7.95, ISBN 1-903039-71-1).

This was a splendid surprise when it arrived a few months ago, and the sharp-eyed reader will note that the author has already turned up as a contributor to the magazine. The blurb on the back of this book would have it that "this is one of the most abundantly various collections of poetry to have appeared in recent years". I would agree. Saxton's range is impressive, his command of form, language and tone quite startling. It's a tough job these days to make a metrical, rhyming poem work, and deliver the goods, but Saxton seems to be able to do it with ease. This is a literary kind of verse and perhaps not the kind that is most in vogue with the poetry establishment — living proof, if you will, that it is not only the avant-garde that gets ignored.

The rub is of course that its very literary tone places this kind of verse beyond the pale for the massed ranks of the anyone-can-do-it school. They can't, and here's a fulsome explanation of what's missing. Carcanet has of course never shied away from the more literary kind of verse, courageously backing poets such as Middleton and Haslam in the face of much misunderstanding.

There are narratives here, short stories in verse, sestinas, lyrics, sonnets, fascinating trans-lations/-versions of Rilke and Mallarmé. Here's the beginning of the latter's 'The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe':

Home in eternity, his grasp the equal of his reach,
the poet rallies his century with a naked sword
shaken aloft to flash the news belatedly abroad
that death still shouts us down in harsh archaic speech.

The book's tone is set beautifully by the opening poem, which concerns the death of Confucius:

By the delinquent, doorbell-ringing,
   trick-or-treating stream
   a scholar who's murdered an examiner

who claimed the year's best student
   as his concubine and failed the rest
   strides along the mossy bank

like a moonwalker with all his library
   on his back, in the first knapsack,
   to a well capped by a giant boulder

In short, a most enjoyable volume, and one to which I shall return often for its delicate pleasures. Recommended.

Maurice Scully: Livilihood (Wild Honey Press, Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, 2004. 338pp, paperback, £15 / $16.99 / €20, ISBN 1-903090-46-6).

As with the Allen Fisher books noted elsewhere on this page, Scully's Livelihood has been one of those texts that has been much talked about but little seen. As with Fisher, parts of the book have appeared from sundry small presses, both Irish and English; as with Fisher, some of the book will bewilder some traditional audiences. Long as it is, it is said to be the middle part of a trilogy. What is it 'about'? Well, it's not actually about anything at all: it does however concern the progress of an intellect as it engages the world, of a voice as it engages with language(s), of a poet as he tackles forms and subverts them.

It was Olson who wanted the whole of geological history in the poem, after Pound, who wanted recorded history in it, and after Wagner, who wanted his operas to be an all-encompassing Gesamtkunstwerk. Scriabin had a go too, with Universe, a synaesthesic blend of lights, colours and smells that never came off. Here we look over the poet's shoulder and listen to his voice as he conducts the total-artwork's vapours. All quite extraordinary.

Nathaniel Tarn: Recollections of Being (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004. 109pp, paperback, £8.99 / $14.99, ISBN 1-844710-55-6).

Long-time readers of Shearsman will know that I am a great admirer of Tarn's work and that that admiration has not diminished with the passing years. Indeed his large Selected Poems (Wesleyan UP) was welcomed here some three years ago as being long-overdue recognition of his qualities. Recollections of Being is his first UK collection since the Palenque volume that Shearsman published jointly with Oasis in the mid-1980s, but that was a kind of interim Selected, showcasing the poet's work since his departure for the USA some fifteen years previously. Tarn is now an American poet, by passport, residence, and inclination, and it's tempting to suggest that he always was, in some way, American.

By that, I mean that he needed the wider frontiers and greater possibilities that North America offered a polymathic author of decidedly intellectual verse. In contrast to Palenque, this volume offers new — or, at least, previously uncollected— work and is all the more welcome for that. as it rounds out the picture of a fine body of work. The tone here is ruminative and oddly reminiscent of William Bronk in places — a connection I'd not made before and, quite possibly, an entirely spurious one. There are still the images of flight that permeate much of his work, and there are reflections on the past and his ancestors (Tarn's forbears came from Lithuania, I believe.) But there are also poems of home, in two sections, entitled 'Home One' and 'Home Two', and poems concerning places in New Mexico, where the author lives. These poems are dominated by powerful descriptive writing that is compacted and has scarcely a word out of place:

Eye-socket muscles clench around snow-glare
like two fists. He sees winter only in this world:
everywhere else is summer. Dogs tame
to gentleness in the yards he passes; only a horse,
taciturn all year, chooses to neigh now.
His Samoyed, white against white, off to war,
scats up black pads like signals. Explosion
of magpies—sky trailing from low tails,
ink and frost featherworks. In these distances,
both east and west, the mountain tables sit
powdered with snow as if the gods had flown
to scatter glacial pollen on their thrones.
He walks a colorless music, ivory and black
coding the universe alone (where, finally,
slight spider death had crawled on poison,
now sorrowed for, and shrunk to her last web).
At the impassable water, where the walk ends,
he hears potential company. No: now it's river
plays her bass counterpoint against a leaf
held to its branch. Treble is higher up, against
a stone. At last, the leaf dislodged moves on
downstream. Sound stops—breaking silence.

(White-out, Pojoaque River)

This is another fine book from Salt, and one that helps to redress the balance a little. We've seen far too little of Tarn's work in the UK these past few years and it's the kind of poetry we need to see more often.

Gael Turnbull: Dividings (Mariscat Press, Glasgow, 2004. 16pp, chapbook, £3.00, ISBN 0-946588-39-2).

One of the last things that Gael Turnbull completed before his death last year, this poem is re-working (or 'masquerade' or 'impersonation', as he said) of a medieval Latin poem from the Carmina Burana manuscript. Gael Turnbull was a man with many strings to his bow and was a restless kind of poet who turned his hand to many different styles — and was all the better for it. Dividings is a delight and who of us that have known his work these past few decades could not chuckle at lines such as these:

Label me 'peripheral'
       and I'll not sneer or whine.
'Quirky', 'peripatetic'
       'eclectic' suit me fine.
'Old stager' even 'stoic'
        don't overstep the line
but 'modest' goes too far and
       I modestly decline.

With tongue firmly in cheek, Turnbull assumes the mantle of the grumpy monk that presumably wrote the original, and — as satire does — tosses a few reflections onto a closer time. A fine chip off the writer's block.