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IN THE HEART
OF MODERNITY
BORROWED by Andrea Holland, 26pp, £3.00; FLAGEOLETS AT THE BAZAAR by Judith Lal,
31pp, £3.00; 19TH CENTURY BLUES by
Patrick McGuinness, 27pp, £3.00;
STRING by Diana Syder, 64pp, £7.95. All titles published by Smith/Doorstep Books
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So, here I am in the heart of
modernity; thus, Andrea Holland (from her poem 'Calefaction'): 'I kissed the
plumber today. a smasheroo...'; Judith Lal (from 'The World's Oldest
Pudding'): 'Birds announce that the / milkman is coming...'; Patrick McGuinness
(from 'The Clamour'): '...I hear the cries / (they're mine) at the foot of
the stair / the end of a supermarket aisle...'; and Diana Syder (from
'Microchip'): 'A low power Viterbi processor chip / is blown up to a metre
square on the corridor wall...'
Which is not to denigrate these various verbal niceties, simply to murmur
that such dexterity does not make a poem, just as note-perfect piano
players are not inevitably able to become fully-rounded pianists.
Nevertheless, there are, of course, moments. Andrea Holland's longish poem of
immaculate elusiveness, 'Solitude (The Library Book)' memorably suggests:
'The curiosity of a stray dog is like quicksand: don't stand still / for too
long, take a good look around. Eyes button black, / black as two ellipses,
something left out of the line on a page.'
Judith Lal's India (amid lines feeling like the Cotswold/East Anglian
countryside) recalls the sorts of visions revered by W B Yeats (from 'The
Butterfly Tree'): ÔSo hot, salt finds a way to the surface / of skin and in
The Great Wood / the wind is a snake in the canopy.'
Regardless of Patrick McGuinness's penchant for European poets (he has two
poems 'after Rilke', one 'after Baudelaire', one 'after DotremontÕ - a
Belgium poet - and I wondered in passing why he felt obliged to
publish his rendition of Rimbaud's sonnet on vowels, certainly to
no greater purpose than the translations that already exist) anyway,
regardless of this tendency, his poem 'Lists' is a moving , traditional poem
about death through illness: '...how easily he let it go, his life of graft
and grudging drudgery, the days racked // on his mind's prison wall,
tomorrow / and tomorrow and tomorrow...// but that last day there was only one. / Then nothing.
None.'
I am fairly certain that the science-poet Diana Syder would not feel the need
to be comforted by my own experience when, a few years ago, I wrote a long
didactic poem 'Equations of Eternity', which was full of proud and learned
esotericism; at least I thought so, as possibly Ms Syder does of her own
work, until I realised that Primo Levi's 'The Periodic Table', for example,
had accomplished more for the juxtaposition of science and feelings than
certainly I had managed and I thought and think perhaps the experimental Ms
Syder too.
Consequently, I found refuge in her 'Electricity Comes to Macclesfield',
which, apart from anything else, exactly conjures up the human sensibleness
of Macclesfield as I remembered it to be:
'The bulb lasted 3 or 4 seconds then blew / while the crowd still held its
breath. // Some said isn't
science wonderful. / Some said
it was moonshine. / Others
couldn't see what it had to do /
at all with milking cows, weaving silk, / paying the rent, or praying.'
© Geoffrey Godbert 2007
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