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The first elusive threads of unmade souls Martyn Crucefix’s close reading of remarkable collections by John Burnside, Tomaz Salamun and Penelope Shuttle |
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JOHN BURNSIDE TOMAZ SALAMUN PENELOPE SHUTTLE
His work was recognized in the early 90s despite bucking the trends of secularism, formalism and plain/street language. His poetry’s brooding intensity lacked laddish brouhaha. The palette was never broad – rural twilights, leaf litter, owls hunting, tracks across snow – but his eye was always on the margins of such things, where the human and the natural met and negotiated. It felt like something spiritual was about to be said or had been articulated and just missed. This was twinned with the powerfully felt absence of fixed personal identity that has remained so deeply engrained in his work. In poems that in many ways were hardly radical, it was this element that made Burnside feel modern. In a self-regarding culture ever more attached to the teats of mobility, individuality, celebrity and fashion, his relentless worrying away at the obscurity of the self, his flirting with its non-existence, struck dissonant but resonating chords. Burnside’s themes are frequently disturbing. But in a poem like ‘Halloween’ from The Myth of the Twin (1994), his exquisite ability to conjure up the British countryside proves to be an essential part of the pleasure of reading him. As often, the season is autumn – cold, mostly deserted, snow, rain, ‘the fernwork of ice and water’. The narrator peels bark from a tree to smell ‘its ghost’ in a characteristic movement from the precisely evoked physical to the almost casually implied spiritual. What the figure in the landscape is trying to do is to ‘define my place’. Even scraping down in the leaf mould he finds fungal traces that look ‘like the first elusive threads / of unmade souls’. Nearby village bells provide ‘nothing’ and the poem typically ends with the figure’s sense of ‘other versions of myself’ on the periphery of vision and these can be taken to imply other futures, untaken pasts, other roles familiarly adopted, even selves beyond the physical – the inconclusiveness is the point. Burnside has pursued experiments with differing perspectives that were first signalled by the opening and closing poems of The Myth of the Twin. Though in the end less successful than its predecessor, Swimming in the Flood (1995) dramatically broadened his poetry’s reach to include the experience of others, often in more extended form and in dramatic monologues. Persecutors and victims inhabit these poems and speak disturbingly of abuse and ‘the inexplicable / malice of being’ (‘Schadenfreude’). This was a turning point in Burnside’s development as what now flooded into the poetry was what had lain buried in the delicacy and tentativeness of the earlier work. In the ‘The Old Gods’ he declares their power is strongest ‘when anger or fear / is fuzzing the surface, / making us dizzy and whole’. The process of uncovering is shown to be one of healing and this Selected includes the sequence called ‘Burning a Woman’ which seems nakedly to speak of the poet’s mother and father. Equally, the ‘Parousia’ sequence (not included here) ends with what appear to be sceptical reflections on his earlier inquisition beyond the merely physical: ‘All resurrections are local... / the sign I have waited to see / is happening now / and always’. Here Burnside seems to arrive at a sense of secular miracle (a version of Rilke’s ‘Hiersein ist herrlich’ (‘Just being here is glorious’), less concerned with the reality of religious presence than with the individual’s response to its possibility. And yet, the dramatic monologues proved something of a cul de sac. With his subsequent work, Burnside has returned to his best subject: himself. Partly what makes the award-winning The Asylum Dance such a magnificent achievement is the development of the fluid poetic form he combines with a second person plural address that achieves the universal without being either hectoring or twee. The influence of William Carlos Williams is obvious but Burnside extends this beyond a fluent impressionism concerned with the truth of things to encompass a philosophical musing, the lines flickering across the page as if viewed through water. This new selection is too brief to achieve the full sense of his development, but one of the marvels of Burnside’s work is its continuing delivery of extraordinary evocations of the natural world that have become gradually melded with an introspective depth that does not merely offer insight but sustained meditation. The four long sequences from The Asylum Dance are rightly given space here and constitute a masterpiece in which the poems offer up rich, disturbing, beautiful, precise, profound and sustained experiences undergone in the act of reading, rather than a lesser poetry’s marshalling of moments of insight and feeling. Burnside’s career already provides ample proof of a fascinating and significant artistic development and this selection will prove a good starting point for anyone not yet following it.
Beckman’s new translations are of work written by Salamun much more recently. The strangeness of the poems remains – many present themselves as long strings of whimsical free association that certainly make redundant the ‘handrail of narrative’, the ‘light-switch of meaning’ (to quote Simon Armitage’s blurb). Here is the opening half of ‘There is only one mother’: ‘Watch out! I am a volcano that needs no sandals. // Your mother gave you a stove-top instead of a mouth. / How scented she is and how she swims. / Sharks lift weights. / It’s great to be walking naked through the edge of space’. Elsewhere Salamun insists, ‘Mix up white and green, delight and dry stench, / you’ll learn something’ (‘I’m not used to it, Lieutenant, I’m not used to it’), and the ‘mixing’ that one’s perceptions undergo in reading Salamun certainly yields interesting notions/sentences at frequent intervals. Some illustrations might be: ‘Scythes and pincers are not the fatherland’ (‘Rituals and the Little Skin’); ‘Hollywood is a hickory in / a peach’s juice’ (‘For, Don’t Rush, Begin to Gape Again’); ‘It hurts that your design is higher, God, it hurts’ (‘Children of Lapis’). These examples have been chosen pretty much at random; but there are times when their deployment through differently titled poems begins to feel a little random too. The question arises whether the displacement of reason by passionate perversity continues to make such (non)sense in a changed political climate. Is there a point at which what is genuinely provocative and preservative of individual freedom in one context becomes, in another, merely frivolous? What can be said with confidence is that the poems in which Salamun’s style is at its most effective here are those that involve the disjunctive and heightened perception of the erotic. He writes great love poems: My heart wrings out and pours, Salamun spends time these days teaching in America and one can find the influence of John Berryman’s Dream Songs in a number of poems that zig-zag from one idea to another, introducing a cosmopolitan cast of characters, and give the impression of drawing on the poet’s own life. ‘Pharaohs and Kings, Kassel, Paris’ opens with ‘We had lovely girls, we were great in the disco, / Andro and me ... We slipped from / the Karst mountains, drove to the sea’. Another poem almost parodies Berryman, with ‘I’m hot in / Kuala Lumpur. Quite known in Singapore ... In Jakarta people don’t have a lot of / money, they have to borrow my books’ (‘White Hash, Black Weed, Gregor is Telling me What you are Doing’). Although I’d guess the books being borrowed here are more likely to be Salamun’s earlier work, it is impossible to deny the inventiveness and energy that he is still capable of drawing on.
In the past, Shuttle’s poems have tended to be full of elemental imagery and, while her subject matter has often been everyday, she has drawn on myths and dreams to transform reality. She has long resisted what she calls the ‘anecdotal verse that rises remorselessly to the surface of English poetry every generation’. In this new book, the rawness of loss has at times led her to record experience in this more common, less familiar form. One poem has her throwing out her husband’s old shoes; ‘To Be Whispered’ touchingly evokes a widow returning ‘to the empty house / where nothing of you lingers’. The long sequence of brief lyrics called ‘Missing You’ begins with what appear literal scenes – ‘No one will bring you your New Scientist, / try to sell you double-glazing’. But, a little like In Memoriam, as grief is altered by time, so the poetry grows ever more bold and imaginative. Latterly, as the widow recalls periods of their life together, she understands it is really a process of purgation which she presents in a wonderfully paradoxical image as if she is ‘discarding the water / from the font at Manaccan / in which an infant has just been baptized’ (‘Missing You’). In grief, Shuttle comes to admire the spider’s ‘capacity for work / and self-expression’ (‘Spider’). Another poem images her art as a sugar factory in which ‘Sometimes profits are up, sometimes down’ (‘Azucar’). But she never really doubts that poetry acts as ‘channel for and transformer of such emotions’ and one of the most admirable aspects of this collection is the role it gives to an art that ‘stays awake long after midnight’. When all other resources have withdrawn, poetry may be ‘half-gold, halfinvisible’ and it may stop to look at ‘nothing-much-inparticular’ but it has staying power: it can sustain itself in ‘suspended animation / for one hundred years, if need be’ (‘Poem’). But this is not confessional poetry in any simple sense. Though inevitably read in the context of personal loss, these poems more frequently illustrate an unbroken spirit by their almost bloody-minded inventiveness (almost a personal version of Tomaz Salamun’s political perversity). A large number of them take the form of lists – some incantatory, some of the shopping kind. On occasions this form seems a reflection of sheer emotional exhaustion, but elsewhere Shuttle’s fecund imagination triumphs. The liturgical ‘Inventing’ moves from the fanciful to the profound: ‘Inventing yellow, and its opposite number ... Inventing twilight, / and gently pulling the garden through it’. Similarly, ‘Dukedom’ is a tour de force concerned with a male muse figure who protects and is remarkable in his generosity: ‘He folds me in his septembers worked / in ivory silk, in his seascapes of living memory. / He wraps me in his dukedom / of windfall, goldfinch and peach’. Perhaps inevitably, in this style of spooling creativity, there are poems that unreel under a rather lower pressure – even some in which the willed compulsion to write has left its mark. But elsewhere, Shuttle pushes beyond this to follow the lead of ‘In the Kitchen’ where, in the face of seismic emotional change, the quotidian world comes to be perceived anew. Here she says ‘I am trying to love the world / back to normal’ and it is perhaps these more brief lyrical outings, which betray less of a need to display their own inventiveness and which begin to sound like grief recollected in some tranquillity, that are most successful: Thrift is the world’s riches made small Instead of forests, one leaf To take a dozen steps is freedom Shuttle is a poet who considers poetry to be ‘magical, ambiguous, mysterious, super and sub-rational, lyrical, logical and crazy all at once’. There is unevenness of achievement in this new book but what makes it an often deeply moving tribute to the dead is her continuing and repeatedly demonstrated belief in the redeeming power of language and imagination.
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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 Tel / Fax: 00 44 (0)20 8521 0776
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