Monday 17 October 2016

Simon Turner - Saying Something Back


http://www.picador.com/books/say-something-back
 

‘Clairaudiently’, the adverbial form of “clairaudience, n., the alleged power of hearing things not present to the senses.”

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‘Maybe; maybe not’: a beautiful poem, reliant on its haunted status.  Language unhitched from its originating meaning – the King James Bible in this instance – to produce something weird and unfamiliar.  It’s like a prayer on the edge of sleep or waking, words drifting free of their moorings to find other, dreamier harbours.

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Every word its own double-image; every poem shadowed by its dream.

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“A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself.”

– Don Paterson, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (2004)

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‘Clairaudience’ comes back in ‘A gramophone on the subject’, a sequence haunted by differing voices and modes of expression: the quatrain form works exceptionally well here, both convincingly ‘timeless’ – the blunt Anglo-Saxonism of the first section could be describing a scene from last week, or ten centuries ago – and rooted in the popular poetry of the period (Kipling, the king of the iambic thrum, is quoted for the title of ‘If any question why’, and rhymed quatrains proved a pretty versatile form whenever Sassoon’s poetry took a turn for the scathing and satirical).

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‘In Nice’ gets over the character, the sheer bolshie verve of sparrows more effectively and efficiently than any piece of writing I can think of: “ – Pip, sirrah, southbound / to red dust scuffles.”  Yes, yes, exactly that, yes.

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Continually citing older poems / poets that themselves had an almost impossible job of memorialisation to do.  ‘A Part Song’s’ line “She do the bereaved in different voices”, for e.g., invoking the original title of ‘The Waste Land’, a poem that ‘remembers’, through its patchwork of quotation, the entire wreckage of Western civilisation: also, ‘TWH’ not only colours what comes after itself – it’s the ground zero of modernist poetry – but also what went before, what it borrows; memory as a two-way street, an impossible river.  Also, ‘A gramophone on the subject’ brings in poetry’s relation to the First World War, where poems had to / were asked required to do the (almost) impossible: to be an adequate memorial to the countless dead.

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Language, the spirit of the dead, / May mouth each utterance twice.

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“So it comes about the war seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance.  Indeed the whole war – which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell – seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively.”

– Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme [1994] (London: Phoenix, 2009): 32

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“Tree seen from bed” / “Late March”: the phenomena of the natural world observed and subsequently described with an hallucinatory clarity, as in convalescence. 

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Perhaps we could see dream as a starting point for the quatrain forms and nursery rhymes that seem to haunt many of these poems: language pushing at the boundaries of the rational, rhyme as language refashioning itself, finding its own harmonies and occluded meanings. 

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“The syntax holds and a poem’s infinite number of overtones are magnified to a greater memorableness.  A poem is charged to that power of release that even to one man it goes on speaking again and again beyond behind its speaking words, a space of continued messages behind the words…”

– W. S. Graham, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946)

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The inarticulacy of grief: language cannot, can never, go far enough; death’s the threshold that cannot be crossed, or even engaged with rationally.    

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‘A gramophone on the subject’ keeps bumping up against the failure of the public language of memory, of memorialisation.  Public grief in these poems – war memorials, cemeteries, the publication of the names of the ‘fallen’ in the local newspaper – can only ever be forms of euphemism, evasion, historical whitewashing: real grief, real memory, is difficult, intractable, and won’t be so easily brought over into words (and therefore transformed into a smooth and seamless narrative): thus, the quotation from Virginia Woolf in the endnotes – “they never mention its [death’s] unbecoming side: its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill adjustment”.   

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the King James Bible;
Shakespeare;
Wordsworth;
Heine;
Yeats;
Kipling;
Eliot;
Conan Doyle, etc.

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The tradition as a living breathing presence in these poems: works of memory engaged not simply in a personal act of memorial recovery, but a collective, cultural one too.  No, that’s not quite right: I think what I mean is that Riley’s acknowledging that poetry is an act of memory, always has been, and that the older it gets as either a field or a form, the more memory it can conceivably contain. 

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What’s notable is the versatility of Riley’s line, her diction.  This is a plain(ish) language – or at least recognisably ‘contemporary’ – that’s able to absorb the colloquial, the higher registers of rhetoric (that “ardent bee” stands out) and the remembered or quoted voices of others without overt juncture, without sign-posting.  The poems are made objects, but show no joins.  I hesitate to call this craft, as it’s a massively unfashionable and loaded term, but there might be no other way to express this feeling.

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Hope is an inconsistent joy.
 

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