Shearsman 62: John Couth reviews Charles Wright

Shearsman 62

John Couth

reviews Charles Wright

Charles Wright: Snake Eyes
(Stride Publications, Exeter, 2004. 184pp, isbn 1900152924, pb, £10.00).

Concerned with recurrence, Snake Eyes focuses us on the slowly ticking clock and the natural world it has been designed to measure. Objects and ideas reappear but each time refreshed. These are poems about landscapes, precisely and evocatively depicted by a poet with a painterly eye, coloured throughout by his inner preoccupations with mortality, perception and the search for understanding.

Against the inexorability of time passing, the pace of the poems is almost defiantly slow. Their drawled, sometimes folksy, always straight forward language presents complex issues in such a way that the very lack of a rational resolution seems the answer itself. In a tone part biblical, part Buddhist, part quiet chat with an old buddy, the reader experiences the interplay of sensation, mind and the objective world – an objective world flowed over by the mind in process. All so personal, it feels like interrupting or snooping on another's private thoughts.

The poet's technique enables the reader to experience directly this process of reflection, which in turn translates directly into the process of writing. The poems collect together thoughts, memories and observations and, although the manner of proceeding may appear haphazard, it is, in fact, following the structure of that process – what Godard might have observed as a logic of the unconscious. Wright's poems demand that you read closely, because what is presented is not a set of hugely different ideas or descriptions but minutely differing experiences which the language delivers and the new perspectives that this makes available.

The themes these poems tackle are not small. One such, which weaves its way through most of the poems, is a 'thirst' to understand the nature of existence in a world embroiled in ego and rationality:

Thus do we slide into our disbelief
                                              and disaffection
Caught in the weeds and understory of our own lives,
Bad weather, bad dreams.
Proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise.

(Looking Around)

The answers, as Wright envisages, are beyond the intellect or emotions to conceive and are only possible through a very Buddhist ('We all have our ways of keeping the Buddha alive') unmediated contact with the world, therefore, dooming to failure any attempt by poetry to engage with this world because of its mediating nature:

The clouds shatter and the clouds re-form.
I find I have nothing to say to any of this.

(Looking Around III)

And as later he indicates in the same poem:

I don't understand why the water keeps saying yes, O, yes.
I don't understand the black lake that pools in my heart.

(ibid.)

That is because he's not trying to rationalise. His method is quiet, thought-free observation, exemplified in his list-descriptions of landscape, sky, weather, rooms, etc. observation, if not the road to 'redemption' or understanding eternity, is a route he finds to peaceful acquiescence and a deeper sort of knowing:

To look hard at something, to look through it, is to transform it,
Convert it into something beyond itself, to give it grace.

(ibid.)

His longing for 'order and permanence' is in the 'night sky' and 'the seasons'. He has a 'thirst for the divine, a long drink of forbidden water' but it is not a thirst he envisages slaked:

Even so, I think it's all incomprehensible,
Everything that we look at.
Much easier, I think, to imagine the abyss, just there,
The other side of the hedge,
                                       than to conjure the hedge,
The trees, and time like a puddle of water and not a stream.

(Night Rider)

He is adamant that surface, mediated reality is not where the truth lies, conjuring the hedge is much more than merely to acknowledge its objective presence:

It is a kind of believing without belief that we believe in,
This landscape the goes
                                 no deeper than the eye, and poises like
A postcard in front of us
As though we'd settled it there, just so,
Halfway between the mind's eye and the mind, just halfway.

(Why, It's as Pretty as a Picture)

As he goes on to explain:

The postcard's just how we see it, and not how it is.
Behind the eye's the other eye,
                                           and the other ear.

(ibid.)

But Wright's predicament, as he is only too aware, lies in describing the world, for like it or not he is its mediator and, however much he might try not to get in the way, his is the thoughtful presence sifting, articulating and giving form to a set of experiences which are as unknowable as they are unpresentable:

Each time I've said it, I've got it wrong.
In front of me two plus two, behind me, two plus two.
If I could do what I thought I could do, I would leave no trace.

(Night Rider)

Yet, such is his faith in the efficacy of language, it is a task he is only too willing to attempt; language is a sort of salvation and offers a way out, even if it is an imperfect one, of his situation:

I used to imagine that word-sway and word-thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That words were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
                                                                I still do.

(Body and Soul)

Nevertheless, like perception and like memory, his poems are:

Insubstantial as smoke, our words
Drum down like fingertips across the page,
                                                         leaving no smudge or mark.

(ibid.)

He writes because he wants to draw a distance, a space between himself and what surrounds him, so that somehow through language the silence and the understanding he seeks through it will be accentuated:

I write, as I said before, to untie myself, to stand clear,
To extricate an absence,
The ultimate hush of language
                                         (fricative, verb and phoneme),
The silence that turns the silence off.

(There Is a Balm in Gilead)

Wright's poems often read like a private journal of observations and thoughts, with time of day and month carefully chronicled. These time checks are the permanents, however artificial, which grant him a vantage point on all things mutable, including himself, permanents which will be undermined not by chaos but by change – a flow of change working throughout the poems to give not only ideas and thoughts but things themselves all the substantiality of something about to drift away. Perception gives the poet contact with the world but perception, as it is exemplified here, floats across surfaces, offering nothing that is more profound than what is:

Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition
Of armoire and table weights,
Oblongs of flat light,
                            the rosy eyelids of lovers
Raised in their ghostly insurrection,
Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings,
Late June and the lilac just ajar.

(Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen)

And the place of poetry in this drifting world is like that of the individual, both a presence and an absence but making little difference:

Landscape's a local affliction that has no beginning and no end,
Here when we come and here when we go.
Like white clouds, our poems drift over it,
                                                        looking for somewhere to lie low.
They neither hinder nor help.

Like Eastern art and literature, Snake Eyes is concerned with stasis, change and recurrence presented through the outer and inner landscapes of the artist's perceptions. Wright's images are in imitation of the world around, if he draws on other sources they are religious and mechanical – micro-technology is outside of his milieu. Nor does society intrude other than in the forms of the occasional silhouetted neighbour or individual recalled from old photographs. Not quite reclusive but this collection of poems certainly operates beyond a social context (a statement of the poet's position rather than negative criticism).

Sense experience, intuition, memory, understanding, Wright lays all these out for the reader in a personal style which is sometimes colloquial, sometimes sage but always perceptive, contemplative and precise. He charts in poetic form a personal route through a recognisable world that you'll have to throw away your compass if you want to follow.