ROBERT SAXTON
Manganese
Oxford Poets, £7.95

SUE HUBBARD
Ghost Station
Salt Publishing £8.95

MARIO PETRUCCI
Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl
Enitharmon £8.95

I had the best possible initial response to Robert Saxton’s second collection, Manganese — I was baffled, irked and then downright annoyed. The poems are acrostics: little riddles full of skewed aphorisms, dialogue nicked from films, imagery wrested from a thousand and one contexts and plunked down in a seemingly random (though often formally exact) manner. Who do we blame, I thought, the Martians? Muldoon? Millennial angst? Why does the ghost of John Ashbery (though still living and frighteningly prolific) haunt so many modern poets? Or is it just MY ghost of John Ashbery, the one I recall everytime I walk by the now burned-out, blackened hull of Cardiff’s Central Hotel where I saw him read once and recall the peculiar intensity of his ice-blue eyes and the mesmerizing quality of his voice, both sonorous and hypnotic.

Perhaps we need to go back even further, to Stevens, to Eliot, to identify the scary shift, analogous in painting in Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, when it all went abstract, when language became divorced from meaning, from narrative, from theme, and suddenly susceptible to its own mysterious inner logic, when the poem becomes unpredictable soundscape? Yes, yes, I’m still thinking, this is the way in which poetry aspires, as apparently all art does, to the condition of music. But which music, I think with irritation, are we talking about this time: orchestral or elevator? rap or hymn? Saxton even leaps among rhetorics, using entirely different tones, making it almost impossible to identify a distinctive ‘voice’ behind the masks.

But as with a flamboyant character whose surface hides layers of substance, so Saxton’s hyperkinetic flourishes, his elaborate evasions, ultimately, upon exposure, constitute a style. Let’s look at first two stanazs of ‘Mountainbiking’:

To change myself forever takes just a slight
wobble. I tear two or three masts from the fleet,
ground oars, like teeth, lost amid drifts of sleet.

My face was always a tall harbour of shale,
six feet from the bay and rich in sea-coal —
blue lobster’s lordly airs in a pilchard shoal.

Tightly rhymed, yes, but also a coded account of what must have been a very painful biking accident. Saxton’s poems are irony-clad. Meaning has to be teased out, or in this case, gleaned from the back cover notes. I initially queried the idea of such a long book, 132 pages, but it takes this sort of trawl through his multiple personalities, as it were, to begin to enjoy and decipher his considerable wit and to observe the breadth of his technical ambitions (couplets, villanelles, sonnets and stanzas: Spenserian, Shakespearean, Dantean and Saxtonian). Of course to essay is not always to accomplish; some experiments here work better than others. His tactics demand much of the reader: erudition, lateral thinking, patience, humour, stamina and not a little courage.

I first became aware of Sue Hubbard through her thoughtful and incisive art criticism. Ghost Station, also a second collection, reflects this sensibility of critic and connoisseur. Many of the poems are about paintings or artworks. While I sometimes feel that poems about paintings are like bad translations — tepid and unnecessary footnotes to the actual work — Hubbard’s poems defy this tendency. She renders details with care and her analogies are often strikingly apt. I liked her sensuous description of a Jackson Pollock ‘splatter’ painting, ‘Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)’:

It is as if by choosing that chromatic season,
with its slowing harmonies, when light grows thin and pale

on the garden wall, he might find equivalence
to the cacophony of niello swirls, that vortex of dun and pearls

in a veil of morning mist rising across the dew-soaked lawn
or damp twilight gathering like dust in unlit corners.

Formally, in contrast to Saxton’s, her poems are unadventurous. The emphasis here is on mood, atmosphere, the palapable surface of things. She is a laureate of detritus: of rooms abandoned at dusk, of the texture of moths or moss, of toad-skin veined like ‘Victorian endpapers’, or bats as ‘gigolos of shadow’. A characteristic poem is ‘Stereoptica’ — which is, according to the note — ‘a wooden device, rather like opera glasses or a carnival mask, into which daguerreotypes or early photographs were placed so that they appeared three dimensional’. The poem captures not only the poignancy of people in old photographs with their ‘erased histories’, but also evokes an eerie claustrophobia; they are also trapped in time: ‘preserved like albino babies in filmy jars on dark museum shelves’.

The most effective poems here concern relationships. Her elegies to a brother, the ‘Gone to Earth’ section, are beautifully tender and genuinely moving. The account of his suicide is presented with great tact; her stages of grief and loss are noted through memories of their childhood. There are several well-observed poems to and about children in the book and one fine love poem, ‘Rope’, featuring the erotic image of a woman’s hair being held back ‘the whole length and hank of it’ during lovemaking. Hubbard skillfully portrays and negotiates the emotionalterrain between her characters. It is no surprise that she is also a novelist.

Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water is an altogether different proposition from the previous collections. Indeed, it stands out among recent poetry titles, for its subject matter is not personal, not anecdotal, not domestic, not urban or rural. Its aesthetic is not formally convoluted, experimental or playful, its tone is not ironic, or contemplative or sweet.

It is a searing account, presented mostly in first person monologues, of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and its hideous aftermath. Inspired by a book called Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, and informed by his own background as physicist, Petrucci has transformed this testimony into vivid, livid poems that are often almost unbearable, at times, to read. Petrucci conjures a surreal landscape, steeped in invisible poisons, and people stung, stupefied, furious at their various fates:

Even the robots refuse. Down tools. Jerk up
their blocked heads, shiver in invisible hail. Helicopters

spin feet from disaster, caught in that upwards cone
of technicide – then ditch elsewhere, spill black running guts.

Not the firemen. In rubber gloves and leather boots
they walk upright, silent as brides. Uppers begin

to melt. Soles grow too hot for blood. Still they shovel
the graphite that is erasing marrow, spine, balls ...

(Chernobyl Wedding)

The tone is cool, declamatory and, poem by poem, the awful details accumulate. The afflicted populace is, as we are, unaccustomed to the sheer weirdness of the effects of the radiation. Artifacts from the affected zone become contaminated contraband: a stolen hat leaves a black brim around the wearer’s skull. People begin to die, some quickly, others, often children, slowly from ensuing cancers. The geiger counter becomes a sort of talisman, its quiet ticking is a fatal oracle. An epic tragedy unfolds.

Writing about people at these extremes is fraught with dangers, both moral and aesthetic. Is true harrowing testimony perhaps best suited to the cold prose of reportage? Journalism keeps us informed so that we may act. If we don’t, aren’t we mere voyeurs, culpable in a kind of pornography? Are certain situations beyond art, as Paul Celan once claimed, that there could be no more poetry after the holocaust? This, I think, is to expect poetry to be less than what it is, less than what it is capable of being. It is not just entertainment, a mere parade of sensation, but a passion play, a place to engage us, hearts and minds.

Petrucci, who has also written movingly about war, has that rare talent, a tragic imagination. He can convey, without necessarily experiencing it at first hand himself, people in terrible circumstances, with unusually convincing subtlety and empathy. An unflinchingly graphic description of someone dying of radiation sickness is filtered, made bearable, through form and tone that is stately, cool, objective, a sane counterpart to the emotional pressure of the event.

This inflicts on the reader the finest sort of shock, not just to the senses, but to the conscience, to the soul. It transcends propaganda by showing all sides here as suffering and complicit. My only gripe would be that several poems in the second half of the book don’t live up to those in the first. It is hard to maintain this sort of intensity, but the filler might have been eschewed. Heavy Water is not an easy read but I would put it amongst the top five poetry collections to appear this year. It is necessary, cathartic and profound.

The encouraging news is that three such high-quality books have been produced at what can be an awkward juncture for poets: second collection, mid-career, middle-age, and by those who perhaps have not, until now, been recognized among the first rank in their chosen field.

Amy Wack is from California. She was educated at San Diego University and at Columbia University, New York. She is Poetry Editor at Seren Press, based in Wales, and Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales magazine.

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