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Intuitively aural, an international aesthetic and a work of genius Kathryn Maris defines her admiration for three new collections |
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SASHA DUGDALE FIONA SAMPSON ANNE STEVENSON
The biggest surprise of all is Dugdale’s aural intuition, given her infatuation with visual art. Seven poems are written in the voice of, or have as their subject, Turner. Another poem imagines the Italian Renaissance painter Verrocchio. Yet another looks at Bellini’s painting ‘Madonna in the Meadow.’ And ‘Under A Shower’ observes a sculpture. A poet so deeply interested in the visual is bound to have an over-developed eye and an under-developed ear, right? Wrong! The first poem, ‘Wide Glass City,’ disabuses the reader of any such notion with its beautiful balance of the visual and aural. The first stanza, descriptive in nature, wallows in shapes and colours. The second and third stanzas follow suit: descriptive and visual. And then bang!: the chilling, cutting, perfectly heard, non-imagistic final stanza: This is not mine, this world These lines have the additional quality of foreshadowing a theme in the collection relating to vision, perspective and retelling — the notion that it’s not only how something is seen that counts, but how it is told. A later poem, ‘On Leaving the Cathedral of the Annunciation’, takes up this theme particularly effectively. It’s a long slender poem in quatrains, with a distant music fuelled by the repetition of prepositions and the pronoun ‘us’, as in ‘above us’, ‘before us’, ‘around us,’ ‘inside us’. Once again the visual descriptions are apt, as in this simile: ‘The saints in rows above us... pinned like little insects.’ This poem gains momentum, becoming more powerful with each stanza. The identity of the speaker starts to shift: ‘I am the granite and the green / I am a moment’s silent horror.’ This shifting of identity is a logical segue to the climax of the poem: ‘How you tell it is the question.’ Nothing is fixed — not identity, not history, not reality. The sentiment is repeated in ‘To A Fellow Traveler’, a poem about writing. The speaker says, ‘I rode across this land and discovered / It existed only in the telling.’ How Dugdale herself tells things is original and — again — surprising. Even when addressing subjects that are traditionally precious, like children or ballerinas, Dugdale is never precious. I am particularly fond of the poem ‘Corps de Ballet’ which describes the ballerinas of Krasnoyarsk, which is in the eastern Siberian region of Russia. The ballerinas earn extra money after their performances by working at late-night strip clubs, sometimes even prostituting themselves. Dugdale describes the ‘horror’ of their bodies: ribs like a ‘railway track’, ‘broken’ feet, ‘no abyss for cleavage’and generally ‘snap fragile’. Men hold out money to take these ‘sexless’ bodies home, for these men are ‘desperate for horror’. Very similarly, the poem ‘Verrachio’ [Dugdale’s spelling] addresses a conventionally attractive subject — cherubs — but words like ‘scum’ and ‘shit’ begin and end the poem, as the speaker describes the dirty, poverty-stricken boys who play in the Florence piazza. Verrocchio sketches them quickly, and the boys turn up as cherubs in one of his paintings. On top of her gifts of vision and retelling, Dugdale is formally adept, too. She can do it all: sestina, villanelle, sonnet, ode. She is not always at her best in these forms — for example, one of the two villanelles in the collection is considerably stronger than the other, the sonnets sometimes lack turns, and the long Turner ode near the end, though ambitious and intelligent, ultimately misses some vitality. But she is an admirably versatile poet. I question only the organization of the book, which occasionally seems haphazard. Why the seven Turner poems at the end, plunked there adrift? Yes, they relate to the earlier poems, and yes, they end the book exactly as it should be ended. But in another way, these poems are a series unto themselves and I’d have put them in their own section. On the other hand, the book is calculatedly free of sections, relentless in a way, a kind of notebook — which makes sense.
The Distance Between Us is a verse novel. It is so fluid and so poignant that it can be read in a single sitting, and re-read just as easily. That is not to say it is an easy work. Far from it. But Samspon herself once said, in an interview, that accessibility is uninteresting to her in a culture that is increasingly dumbing itself down. The breathy abstractions, the energized relentlessness can remind one of Jorie Graham — a poet not widely known as ‘accessible’, but who has her diehard fans nonetheless. It makes sense, when pondering the abstract nature of Sampson’s work, to know that she was a professional violinist through her mid 20’s. It makes sense to know this also when one sees the constant musical references in this work. These references appear in titles, such as ‘The Orpheus Variation’, ‘Cante Jondo’, ‘Turkish Rondo’. They also appear in musical directives and nouns such as ‘dolcissimo’, ‘harmony’, and ‘pitches’, and in sounds such as ‘za-zoooom’. And an entire scene is devoted to the speaker’s musical debut: I was a Story in the high key of over-reaching While there was significant musical influence in Sampson’s previous Seren collection, Folding the Real, the poems in this work feel as if music is woven into them inextricably, like DNA. Alas, music is the only thing inextricable from this speaker. All else can — and is — separated from her: identiy, love, closeness. The ‘novel’ begins with heartbreak, ‘The Orpheus Variation’, and soon moves on to a resigned speculation about identity and attraction within love, ‘Love’s Philosophie’: ‘In a Hall of Mirrors / self find self. Repeated.’ And later, in ‘Brief Encounter’ these lines seem similarly crucial to the themes of loss and distance: ‘how to close this gap? / How to bring He and I / into the same story?’ Though the work closes with an act of lovemaking, there is a way that this act is not hopeful at all, as one might expect, but sorrowful. Dialogue suggestive of miscommunication — ‘Touch me’ and ‘Where are you? — is interspersed with actions such as ‘sobbing.’ One suddenly wonders if this verse novel is linear, or if the end is in fact the beginning: the beginning of the distancing that is laid down in the first poem, ‘The Orpheus Variation’: Who’d believe, meeting us now, our skin smooth and cool as tiles: in each other’s hair? The Distance Between Us works best at its most pared down and philosophical moments, such as that one. Conversely, a section like ‘Turkish Rondo’ feels confused, even overstuffed with characters. There’s Soaper, Rick (aka Tariq), Amy, Mum and Steve, not to mention the speaker. ‘Cante Jondo’ is similarly replete with characters, but the characters there are mythical or at least folkloric — lending more universality to that section. And universality seems much the point of this pan-European collection.
Paradoxically, it is difficult to say much in a short space about a 400 page work by a literary giant like Stevenson, except this: praise be to God — and Bloodaxe — for giving us not one, but now a second Collected Poems by this witty and important poet. There are too few volumes of collected poems by women in this country; this one just begins to fill the void. What makes this volume, called Poems: 1955–2005 (an update from her last collected, which included work through 1995), unusual is its thematic arrangement and therefore surprising juxtapositions of poems from early in her career with those from later in career. Attention has been paid to organization; there is a section devoted to reading and craft (‘The Art of Making’), a section devoted to poems from Cwm Nantcol, another section about Scotland, poems about her children (‘Seven Ages’) and a poignant final section devoted to the influential dead like Sylvia Plath, John Cole, Peter Redgrove and Elizabeth Bishop. Though mournfulness is not really consistent with Stevenson’s aesthetic or approach to craft, some of the recent elegiac poems are among the most moving in the collection, as in ‘New York is Crying,’ a response to the 9/11 tragedy in New York City. Here is the first stanza: Halfmast New York is crying for her children Though she addresses 9/11 directly, which many would say is a huge artistic risk, it works because the tone is fierce, and the language wavers between simplicity (policemen, firemen) and irony (execuwives). There is an odd mix of humour, sympathy and criticism in this poem that encapsulates so much of Stevenson’s work. My favorite stanza is this one — so poignant to a poet or lover of poetry and/or New York City: Is that Walt Whitman? Yes, but he is crying. There is strong rhyme in some stanzas, such as this one, more distant rhyme in others. Stevenson’s manipulation of form allows for modulation, for turning volume up and then down as needed. And such is her genius. One can see the seminal nature of her work quite plainly in this volume. Stevenson’s work Correspondences: A Family History in Letters, a 1974 collection which versifies letters written among the Chandler family of New England in the 19th and 20th Century, is much imitated — well, not exactly imitated but of fascination to American poets of my generation, who have published or are writing similar historical-epistollary collections. I am not the ideal reviewer for Anne Stevenson, for my opinions are clouded by my hero-worship, but I remain just sane enough to endorse this work unreservedly, as unreservedly as I endorse Dugdale’s and Sampson’s.
Kathryn Maris, listings editor of Poetry London, was educated in Boston and New York City. She has held several writing fellowships in America, and has published essays, reviews and poems in magazines and anthologies in the US and the UK. Her first collection of poems The Book of Jobs will be published in the US by Four Way Books in autumn 2006. She divides her time between London and New York City.
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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