Baffled loves
Emma Fisher
That Singing Mesh Terence Tiller (Chatto/Hogarth £3.00 paper) Melusine & the Nigredo Simon Lowy (Carcanet £2.00 paper) Life Before Death P.J. Kavanagh (Chatto/Hogarth £3.00 paper) The Spring Collection Pete Morgan (Seeker £3.50 cloth) With gloomy certainty, Terence Tiller says in his Foreword that he will write no more poetry (apart from translations and perhaps light verse), and in the last poem in the book — also the title poem — relentlessly sums up his view of his own productions: 'I grew my orchards with no living fruit: /poems were trees of wind-hung prisms, each/bejewelled like a grotto . . . ' There is something dry and artificial about his sequences of knotted-together knowledge. Some poems are supplied with heavy-handed notes, pointing out the rhyming slang derivation of 'Hampton', or sadly explaining: 'It may be noted that although Diana is not mentioned in the poem 'Luna' her virginity is suggested by references to inert gases, the prime numbers, and rhymeless words.' Even this explanation could not vivify these lines for me: 'Such virginities,/the lunar hand of pearl of the elect,/gas-goddesses, are counted soon indeed.' At worst, he makes origami out of pages from an encyclopaedia, as if to distract himself. At best, when he finds a potent resonance or an emotional impluse that does unite the images, he is often let down by a thinness in the punchline, or a lack of cohesion in the thought. Sometimes emotions and learning jostle one another without quite making sense, as in 'Last Supper': after bringing in Procne, the Last Supper and covens, the poem ends: I have spun poems out of time and flesh, webs I would have you lie on; if I come offering these, they also are my seed: allow my love, then: sup not yet, A rachne.
The predatory female spider first incongruously relaxes in a hammock; that webs are seed is a violent transition; if he's written the poems, had the progeny, they are not an argument for putting off eating him; the spider does allow love, it's just that she eats the male afterwards, so why ask her to allow it? And only the basic eating of flesh connects this final verse with the other Last Suppers. And so on. He denies that the poems are autobiographical, though insisting that they are all love poems. He thus assumes the persona of a lover, often of a Muse rather than a woman, while disengaging himself from the often painful emotions he describes, which adds an extra confusion. The complicated allusions can seem like a cover for nakedness, a mask for prose.
Simon Lowy's book is his first; he has certain likenesses to Tiller, using some of the same ingredients — myths, Moebius strips, prisms: '0 red-haired moon excuse my prism' — having a sequence of octaves where Tiller has douzaines, even writing a poem about being eaten by a mistress or muse. Also, his poems are hermetic, though unlike Tiller he works from within one discipline, alchemy; and he is unlike Tiller in another way — in spite of (perhaps because of) their opaqueness, I find his poems exciting, engrossing and re-readable. Partly this is because of his playful and musical way with language. Some of his puns and jokes are appalling, some brilliant.
A milkman and his fishwife queen Play chess upon the chequered green. A pawn defects from his assaults, A queen defaults with her effects .
A simple pun Petrified the apostolic succession.
An apple filled the world with worms.
(From 'The chequered green' and 'The release'.) Somehow, even when hardest to understand, he manages to imply a sense behind the exterior, so that even puns, conceits and easy rhymes — Melusine's eyes are agate green, apple green, she is green in many other ways — seem to be in touch with it; they slightly detach meaning from language, suggesting not that what one is reading is nonsense, but that there is more meaning or unity in it than ordinarily. The milkman and his fishwife queen, games of chess, and other symbols and personages reappear and have a strange autonomous acceptability. I did not discover who or what the Nigredo was, or why the three groups of poems are called Sulphur, Salt and Mercury. But not all the poems are obscure. 'Everything flows' is a comment on, or answer to, the ancient cliché; the second verse goes: Nearby a singer herding goats Penned his song into its notes, Beneath the stream that flowed away A fish stood swimming where it lay.
Alchemists search for magical power, the ability to change substances through a system of consonance or sympathy between them. It is a good metaphor for poetry and for anyone's quest to understand or formulate reality in words. Sometimes he does use its processes as straight metaphor: 'As lead that turns to gold I turn to you.' Though the blurb describes him as 'pursuing his experiments' in Denmark, he is enough of an unbeliever to let unbelievers in. Yet he uses the system as a source of beautiful and rich imagery without making it seem an arbitrary construction.
How clear and direct the poems in P. J. Kavanagh's latest book feel in comparison. Instead of an autonomous world, he gives us a compassionate and piercing look at the world: he tries to share the weight of the burden all men alive carry, which is baffled love.
He is never sentimental; when he calls his children 'downy' it relates them to the prickling bales of hay they play in ('While the sun shines'). When comparing A to B, it is solely to illuminate A. Not for him the oblique method or hidden meaning, except through compression. All the same, among social poems about other poets, and bits of pure observation like 'Dandelion', 'Elder' and 'Seal', he describes some delicate and intangible states of mind, especially A 'mystical experience', at least, a leap Into the fifth, ninth, whatever it is. dimension?
Simpler than that. A tank of loss filled up . . .
CA few still believe in heavenly reunions'.) In 'Doggerel' he describes it again, purposely 'Beyond decoration, humble, in plain rhyme,/As clear as I could, and as truthful'. In fact 'plain rhyme' is too modest: the 29 lines have final words that end either in t or d, 'heard', 'road', 'out', or in m or n, 'pain', 'warm', 'drown'. The first kind associate themselves with the state of frozen indecision, the second, which take over entirely, with the revelation of peace and comfort; and there are more subtleties within this scheme. Not doggerel, certainly.
Pete Morgan's second full-length book buzzes with the same vitality and showmanship as his first, as clever and various as before if a little more meditative. In 'The poet's deaths' a poet dies in nine different ways, the last one not a physical death but going to live in the country and ceasing td write. The poem satirises both poets and and the label or image 'poet', to which clings what Robert Graves called 'an aroma of holiness'; in a note Morgan quotes this and assures us that the 'poet' is only a persona and that is not how he sees himself. He often depicts himself as a man with a gun, enjoying shooting down what passes, or not, as he gets older and less certain: 'easing the trigger finger/he let the rifle barrel fall/and watched white-eyed/the poem/pass.' Nevertheless his aim is still accurate, and he can encompass more moods that this picture might suggest — from a ballad-like style to a simple love lyric, to a declaimable public poem full of rapid-fire repetitions, with short quips, enjoyable games and longer landscapes in between.
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