Keith Jafrate: Songs For Eurydice (Stride, Exeter, 2004. £7.50, pbk, ISBN 1900152940)

Andy Brown: Hunting the Kinnayas (Stride, Exeter, 2004. £9.50, pbk, ISBN 1900152916)

Impressionistic, sometimes spiralling like jazz, Songs for Eurydice atmospherically evokes a world in which love, loss and the afterglow of memory merge with and pattern a fragile reality. Sometimes leading gently, other times with its breathless urgency and repetition demanding a mystical response, as from a preacher.

We are made aware from the start that language alone will not fix the meanings or guide us through the labyrinth of these poems; the swirl of connotations and random connections are ours to make:

I give you these metaphors
easy census of similes
of their failure
the language chrome
meaning disease          (part 1, a magical submission)

But so too are we left in no doubt of the personal nature of the poetry and the intensity of the loss:

tonight the wind pours in the trees
opens the wounds of this house
and I study solitude
like a child by a dead bird     (ibid.)

Jafrate's use of the Orpheus myth, as might already be inferred, is symbolic; his interest in the narrative is as a template to place over his own experiences and not to engage academically with Orphism. His lost love (or loves) is a personal Eurydice who floats for him beneath the page, viewable through the evocations of thought and language, but physically beyond reach. On the occasion he creates an Underworld of the imagination, it is not the realm of Pluto he turns to for ideas but to the French artist and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau:

and then the hangar of faulty striplights
no rhythm to the flicker
fathers and mothers yellow-grey
on bare concrete
everywhere the figures in lab coats
hold out meters to measure the moaning …     (part 2 the descent beckons)

Persisting throughout Songs…, however, is another sort of Underworld, not of the imagination, but the more vivid urban/sub-urban landscapes of direct experience — ugly, uniform and marked with the squalor of decay (the work of the Titan nature in man?):

in this poison land
on a humpback bridge
alone with the cooling towers
sieved acres
coffee-dark and black
gulls and bulldozers
chunks of water left in pits
the victims of double-glazing
their decaying towns
surrounded by poison               (part 4 birdsong)

It's a done line, but pursued with intensity, belief and an eye for detail. The natural world, true to Romantic tenets, possesses beauty, mystical presence and is a palace of the infinite:

the slow waves of trees shift
leaves push gold into the light
light flowering fall to gold
to gold waves shift and push when
fall flowering waves of light shift
into light push into waves' shift
flowering gold when waves fall
into shift in fall light
waves gold and flowering
when flowering flowering things
in waves fall flowering          (part 7 the song of orpheus)

This impressionistic, painterly description contrasts with the language used to describe the 'poison land' which functions far more denotatively; the language of 'slow waves' soon submerges us in the ebb and flow of light, pattern, connotation, the colour of sound and repetition's intensity as it seeks to approximate to the mystery of Orphean song.

When we come to examine Jafrate's natural world, however, we're left in no doubt that beneath the beauty and fragility there's strength that the 'poison land' doesn't possess. Despite the concreteness of its description, it's the urban environment which is prone to dissolution and ultimate decay because it's the work of hands and rational minds, whereas the natural world is an imaginative creation brought about through mystical encounter and, therefore, like religion and high aesthetics, able to endure and renew itself as idea and 'song', beyond verifiable meaning or taxonomy.

in the stillness of dawn
when the bird's purity has no hindrance
in a lane under trees
where the tarmac dies away
to run out of road
and the desire for motion
and the desire for language

Nature is not a side issue or distraction, for Jafrate's search for Eurydice leads him through the natural world (the true Orphean environment?) so that the one often interweaves and blends with the other, like lovers, imbuing the loss and love motifs with added significance.

This is an imaginative, deeply personal work, formally sustained, and with an intriguing power to ignite thought and emotion.

Encompassing imagination and description, Hunting The Kinnayas seems to fight shy of any direct engagement with ideas. The poems are neat, clearly articulated and (almost contrary to the ethos of the very good Stride catalogue) easily accessible.

The style works well for the straightforwardly recounted, smilingly human 'A Life Story' which is about an encounter with a lady centenarian with problems over the precise mathematics of her life events, and with the wildlife poems and descriptions of nature:

The ocean laps at our front door. Lagoons of mangrove suck in mists and with them flotillas of fishing boats at danger if they stay longer at sea. The traces of raindrops on mudbanks break the monotonous flats. Time seems to disappear between sky and sea.
                                        (Lying in a Hammock)

This simplicity, tested in more demanding pieces, is supported by his belief that reality is un-mediated and self-explanatory. Is he dumping duality for some sort third way or, like the French poet Da Silva, attempting to comprehend the world through the fresh eyes of a child? I'm unsure, but he does seem to see ideas and thought as an obstacle to understanding not as an unavoidable, though delimiting, pathway. As he articulates with almost undergraduate frankness:

What is life's great purpose?

O god, not again! Look,

there it is, in black and white:

a magpie in a field of Friesian cows;

a blackbird in a field of crusting snow;

the cawing rookery in the crowded oak motte-

black crows skinning the white lamb's fuzzy belly.

                                        (Poem)

So for Brown the world is not what we construct with the aid of our experiential and ideological building blocks but is in front of us all the time if we would only see it. Thus many of the poems in this collection are an attempt to make the world directly visible to us – acts of seeing and recording:

Towards the river's seaward turn the flow is slow, meandering. Wide tidal flats at the sea's low tide support a spread of hungry birds. Silt brought down from inland fans the delta between reeds. Here molluscs & crustaceans breed. To the eyes of walkers on sterile dunes, where only the skylark nests in monotonous marram and shifting sand, the estuarine mud-flats seem a bland expanse …
                                        (from Field Notes)

Stylistic echoes of old wildlife texts – there's an intertextuality about several of the other pieces too. In 'from Sinbad in Britain', a fragmented, outsider's view of a pagan Britain, there's more than a hint in its contrivance of Umberto Eco but without the semiological direction; and 'The Diary of an Ugly Human Being', worked from extracts of 1950s travel magazines, reminded me of Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' without the placement of imagination over and as experience. I wasn't sure what to do with these pieces but to admire (as artefact?). Or perhaps be invited to step through them, like Alice's mirror.

A gentle humour pervades the collection giving it, at times, a lightness of touch which is almost Eastern, even when dealing with the weight of subjects like time, memory and the past – this imbues the work with humanity and warmth. A more overt playfulness can be found in poems like 'A Mythology of Birds' and 'Bird Island Discs' (if you enjoy ornithological poems Hunting the Kinnayas is for you). But for me the successes lay in the simple humanity of poems like 'The Wharfside Stall of Mr Lai' and 'A Life Story' and the more multi-layered later pieces on time.

copyright © John Couth, 2005. All quotations are copyright by the authors.