GUEST REVIEW: SIDE ON VOICU

Jeffrey Side reviews

Sky Hands 

by Daniela Voicu

Daniela Voicu’s Sky Hands is one of those poetry collections that I am always pleased to read, as it is neither descriptive nor literal but utilises imprecision and generalisation. Such aspects of poetry were the norm in poetic writing up until the early 1800s with the advent of Wordsworth and the British Romantic poets, who introduced an emphasis on descriptiveness that became the predominate poetic style in Western poetry until the arrival of High Modernism in the early Twentieth Century. Sky Hands refreshingly avoids this.

The most noticeable aspects about the collection are its use of three things: novel word juxtapositions, idiosyncratic turns of phrase, and mixing of the concrete with the abstract. These elements are present in almost every poem. The first of these elements, novel word juxtapositions, is something that has a great poetic lineage.

Two of the best exponents of it in poetry were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and it can be found in Jack Kerouac’s ‘211th Chorus’: ‘quivering meat/conception’, and in his ‘The Thrashing Doves’: ‘all the balloon of the shroud on the floor’. And, of course, in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl: ‘hydrogen dukebox’, ‘starry/dynamo in the machinery of night’ and ‘supernatural darkness’. Other poets who have utilised this technique are Tom Clarke in ‘You (I)’: ‘siege/engines’, John Ashbery in ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’: ‘perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip’ and William Blake in Milton: ‘freezing hunger’, and ‘eternal tables’.

The use of this technique results in elliptical breaks between juxtapositions of words not normally collocated and which, therefore, allows for the possibility of expanded meaning. It operates similarly to Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of cinematic montage where,

the emphasis is on a dynamic juxtaposition of individual shots that calls attention to itself and forces the viewer consciously to come to conclusions about the interplay of images while he or she is also emotionally and psychologically affected in a less conscious way. Instead of continuity, Eisenstein emphasized conflict and contrast, arguing for a kind of Hegelian dialectic, where each shot was a cell and where a thesis could be juxtaposed by an antithesis, both achieving a synthesis or significance which was not inherent in either shot.

In Voicu’s poems we see similar instances of this, as in ‘To Not Lose My Self’ (p.11): ‘time strips’, ‘groan dissolution’, ‘destiny rain’; in ‘Sky Hands’ (p.15): ‘rainbow pencils’; in ‘-26C...’ (p.16): ‘finger opera’; in ‘A Thought’ (p.20): ‘gate-souls in constellation’; in ‘Raining’ (p.23): ‘impossible horizon’; in ‘Style’ (p.24): ‘nitrogen air’, ‘crown tree’; in ‘Molecular Blue’ (p.26): ‘molecular love’; in ‘Air (Haiku)’ (p.27): ‘eternal love kiss pearl soul’; and in many other poems in this collection.

Another aspect of Sky Hands that is very effective is its use of idiosyncratic turns of phrase such as: ‘depending on words hungry for invention’ and ‘I learn the blind silence’ (in ‘You are Special’, p.18); ‘the sky is naked and the thinking of time is anchored’ (in ‘A Thought’, p.20); ‘the shy night puts her cheek on the breast of the moon’ (in ‘Glow’, p.21); ‘I walk on the Tropic of Cancer’ (in ‘Style’, p.24); ‘water that flows from the heaven on your skin’ (in ‘Molecular Blue’, p.26); ‘to live correctly we must be born old’ and ‘I am lost in your crazy arms’(in ‘Cathedral of Your Love’, p.30); and ‘Every day it is a place for another day’ (in ‘Surfing Silence’, p.36)

The use of both novel word juxtaposition and idiosyncratic turns of phrase enable a sort of linguistic defamiliarisation, which is always pleasing to experience.

Voicu’s mixing of the concrete with the abstract, is also interesting. Abstraction by itself, of course, is no stranger to poetry. By abstraction, I mean those phrases and image combinations that are too generalised and indeterminate to be strictly referential. These are not to be confused with what William Empson called “sleeping” or “subdued” metaphors but are similar to what he refers to in Seven Types of Ambiguity as ‘ambiguity by vagueness’. An example of abstraction can be seen in William Blake’s ‘To the Muses’ where the phrase ‘chambers of the sun’, in the first stanza, does not specifically refer to anything. The phrase ‘chambers of the East’ in the previous line, however, does. It refers to the cavernous areas located near the mythical Mount Ida (represented in line one as ‘Ida’s shady brow’), the place from which the gods watched the battles around Troy. It could also refer to the mountain in Crete where Zeus was said to have been born. The phrase ‘chambers of the sun’ does not allow for closure in this way. The word ‘sun’ (a source of light) has no connection semantically with the word ‘chambers’ (a source of darkness). Also, the sun is noted for its lack of vacuity, unlike caverns.

Voicu utilises abstractions of this sort but also “connects” them to the referential, but in doing so the abstractions are not weakened but paradoxically strengthened. Examples of some of these are:

‘rhymes flow over the sunset’ (‘Sky Hands’, p.15)

‘we have hands to hold words’ (‘We’, p.12)

‘every window has a shadow of a dream’ (‘Windows Without Dreams’, p.22)

‘my skin is filled with cries’ (‘Style’, p.24)

‘I will paint your body with love words’ (‘Remember’, p.28)

Such a conjoining of the concrete and the abstract is to be welcomed in poetry, as, indeed, are the other poetical aspects mentioned in this review.

Sky Hands is well worth a read. Its poems span the full range of human emotions and will evoke in readers’ minds a myriad of interpretive possibilities that will enrich their reading experience and transport them to a dimension that is dreamlike in its imaginings, simple in its beauty and moving in its honesty. What more can be asked of poetry?

Guest Review: Houghton On Bourke

Nicholas Houghton reviews
Piano
by Eva Bourke

Despite having lived the latter part of her life in Galway, Ireland, Eva Bourke’s German heritage and education are woven seamlessly into her most recent collection, Piano. A background rooted in the heart of continental Europe, then nurtured on its most westerly point, has granted her a feel for atavistic detail and oblique metaphor that enables her to take us on a journey to the essence of existence.

The eponymous third poem in the first section, ‘The Soul of the Piano’ is anything but oblique though, it is a statement of intent, enclosing the poems to come within the smooth polished wood of Bourke’s metaphorical piano, while simultaneously placing the piano at the centre of the poems:

The soul of the piano smells of damp backyards, potato soup, harbour bars after rain, of school proms, war and gun powder, perfume and palace gardens in spring.

It is the deftly played notes of this piano that augment our journey through Bourke’s world of people and things to the centre of experience.

In the second section, ‘Achill Kileen’ takes a folk custom of old Ireland, that of burying unbaptised babies near to prehistoric graveyards in the hope that the ancient gods would look after their souls, and places it in a contemporary setting, deftly mixing past with present. The first stanza ends with:

…far out between two rocks, the sun

opens a blue door

and ushers a trawler and crew into

the glittering high rise of the day.

But by the third stanza:

I stand in a field above the sea

strewn with pieces

of white quartz

each marking a child’s grave.

By moving from the everyday beauty of trawlers going to sea in this fundamentally unchanged environment, via the conduit of the grief of parents burying children too young even to be named:

But the young parents who knelt

on the hillside knew them by heart-

grief they were called, loss and anguish.

to a tight focus on a small patch of quartz marked grass, Bourke has forged a connection between past and present, the everyday and the seemingly insurmountable. Work and grief are always with us.

The shifting nature of our relationship with time and nature is a theme that recurs, and is ultimately uplifting, as in ‘Evening near Letterfrack,’ one of the many prose poems, where two women are observed walking along a beach:

The one, young, black, wore a Nubian crown

of plaited locks, the other’s head shone in the evening light

like weathered driftwood, smooth, bleached and silvered….

….where were divisions now? The line between

the water and the sky, all binaries and opposites

dissolved here at the end of Europe.

These two timeless figures could be from any age, and bring a healing perspective to some of the images that have gone before.

The poet as recorder of scenes is explored in a series of poems that address the power of photographs seen years after they have been taken, the most powerful of which is ‘Self-portrait, 1939.’ Here, the decay of the photograph becomes a pathetic fallacy, leading the subject to ruminate on her own eventual death:

Was it some lingering illness

that killed me or the darkroom toxins?

allied to the spread of war,

or was I buried beneath the rubble

of Munich?

The poem then opens out, growing further from the detail of the photograph, creating a sense of foreboding:

Should I have watched the signs,

the rallies in the squares,

the marching songs, shouts shots,

the birds scattering in a panic

from the treetops on the left,

the ineradicable stain that spread

across the image from the margins

blotting out the world?

It is rare to find a poet who can move so swiftly and yet in such a perfectly judged way from musing on their own mortality to the horrors of global conflict, without seeming self-indulgent; Bourke achieves this seemingly without effort.

Bourke’s ability to move from the quotidian to the transcendent is much in evidence in a series of prose poems toward the end of the collection.  In ‘Journal from the Mirrored Cities,’ the:

bleached blondes talking incessantly, serve underworld delights, hot mustard, aromatic wines, blandishments,

expands exhilaratingly to:

the peace-keeping army of stars streaming across roof tops, the great fireworks in summer that consume the night.

Later in ‘Journal from the Mirrored Cities,’ a bus journey delivers an everyday vision written in the type of magnificently quiet language that pervades the collection:

The young woman beside me on the bus who was plugged into another universe wore a sheer blouse over her shorts and a thin red necklace from Bruges. She was so beautiful that even her freckles were celestial, a fine spray of golden constellations.

The penultimate poem, ‘Koan,’ circles back, recapturing the sense of faith that pervades the earlier poems, and connecting it to actual religious imagery:

despite the explosives the great Buddhas are still there guarding

   their valley,….

and:

….demonic intertwined forms, the devils wear delicate beaded

skirts to cover their shame, Isaac

leans his young head into the crook of his father’s arm whose

   other arm

is already lowering the knife.

Ultimately though, the poet leaves us on our own:

a single player in an empty court

in darkness, fog and silence.

The poems in this collection encompass spirituality, human suffering, beauty and kindness. This is the type of book that will resonate with readers of all ages. Much like a piano, it reflects the player’s commitment to that instrument’s complex possibilities, and I shall certainly be re-visiting these poems.

Nick Houghton has just graduated from a creative writing and English literature degree at Kingston University. His first novel, ‘Dirty Tuesday’ will be completed in September 2013.

Ian Pople On a Shoestring and a Flarestack Book

John Hartley Williams Assault on the Clouds

David Clarke Gaud

reviewed by Ian Pople

Much is made on the blurb of John Hartley Williams’ individuality.  He’s described as ‘one of the great originals of contemporary English poetry’, and ‘joyfully anarchic and surrealist’.  In fact, Williams and Clarke share a love of quirky narrative. Thus, a range of characters populate both poets work, sometimes with names that wouldn’t have shamed Douglas Adams.  In Assault on the Clouds:  Hartley Williams has produced a group of short stories in verse, in which a group of characters react in varying ways to wild and surreal events in their ‘lives’.  Eggwold Zunn, the auto-didact, meditates on Cleopatra’s nose, and is asked to comment on many things from the deposing of  the Emperor, to the nude Saint Ronda of Arboa.  The General rides his donkey around an imagined country, Arboa, which, I’m sure, we are meant to assume is a mythical China. And a ‘poet’ who also comments laconically on the action going on around ‘him’. 

I’m assuming that the poet in the texts is a him.  This is as much because the writing as a whole is muscular and direct.  I hesitate to call it ‘masculine’, but actually it does come across as rather masculine.  The humour seems of a piece with that slightly common-room satire which has provided a rich vein of English writing but can be a little exclusive and public school.

That is my reservation about this collection.  But there is no doubt that Hartley Williams is hugely inventive and has created a ‘world’ in these poems that is often fully realised and involving.  Hartley Williams also invents words which nicely fit in the worlds of the poems, ‘The travellers are spying with their vanderscopes/on the geisha and her poet./She retains a single comb in crowblack hair;/ he roams her apricot thighs with his tongue.’ ‘Through the Keyhole’.  This excerpt illustrates some of Hartley Williams’ method;  the clipped sentence structure containing a clipped portrayal of events;  the deft use of an unusual adjectives, i.e., ‘apricot’. 

David Clarke’s Gaud is a winner in the Flarestack pamphlet competition.  And there is a muscularity to Clarke’s writing too.  Where Hartley Williams has a clipped, snappy style, Clarke uses a more impacted, costive syntax.  That sentence structure is much more populated with adjectives than Hartley Williams’, ‘Haggard teenagers/in threadbare chinos riffle/Blu-Rays of gaudy murder,/as the in-store DJ spins a/ retro Osmonds cut.// And the result of this density is that the charge of over-writing might sometimes be laid at Clarke’s door.  That said, Clarke, like Hartley Williams, is entirely capable of creating an adroitly imagined world in his poems;  for example in ‘Notes Towards a Definition of the Revolution’ Clarke reports ‘an earnest// panel of intellectuals consuming/ meat-paste sandwiches in a Sheffield Labour/ Club in the mid 1970s;’  There’s a loving detail in that which is beguiling and strong.  And here too, is an example of Clarke’s way with line-endings where adjective may be sheared from their nouns.
 

Ian Pople's Saving Spaces is published by Arc. His first book of poetry, The Glass Enclosure (Arc, 1996), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection, An Occasional Lean-to, was published by Arc in 2004. He teaches at the University of Manchester.