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Recent Reading: Poetic
Conversations
Enigma and Light, David Mutschlecner
(96pp, Ahsahta)
My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer,
Paige Ackerson-Kiely
(109pp, $17.50,
Ahsahta)
The Rapture, Tim Cumming (81pp,
Salt)
Voluntary, Adam Thorpe (67pp,
£10.00, Cape)
a compact of words, rob
mclennan (95pp, 12 euros, Salmon)
grief notes, rob mclennan
(76pp, BlazeVOX)
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Imagine a world where Agnes Martin and Gertrude Stein
converse, where Charles Olson and Joan Mitchell discuss painting and poetry,
where Heidegger and Pound debate the meaning of life. That world is here in
David Mutschlecner's exquisite new book from Ahsahta Press, currently
producers of some of the most beautifully designed volumes. Enigma and
Light is boldly wrapped in a close-up of
grey canvas, with only the type and a bright slash of yellow paint on the
reverse to break it up. Inside there is a similar effect: these are
slow-paced and well-considered poems with not only a quiet music but a depth
of allusion and philosophy, poems where
thought rolls and turns
and
catches the crest-
light epiphany
[from
'Charles Burchfield / John Henry Newman']
But it is not all abstract or ethereal, these poetic conversations take place
in a world where
We stand in the parking
lot's cold
and talk about the man
who was found
frozen to death
curled on the stoop
[from
'Herman Melville / Martin Puryear']
and the poetry is spurred on and around these kind of everyday events.
Mutschlecner goes from strength to strength with each book he writes. Enigma
and Light is outstanding in its
intellectual and musical achievement.
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Paige Ackerson-Kiely's book is also beautifully produced,
but her work is feisty and opinionated. This author [wo]manhandles text into
slabs of opinion and experience, channelling emotion and lust, anger and
love, into taut enigmatic ventriloquist prose poems and carefully paced poems
which approach their subject from a number of angles, like a streetwise
cubist. This author takes an idea and runs with it, for instance in
'Folding', which begins
We fold under the ennui,
the mute spiritus
languishing in
group-speak. We fold
the muttered hymns into
loops behind
pop songs that we are
advised to feel.
We fold across the
shuddering
plains of our nation disabused
of its raising.
We fold the girl into a
woman [É]
and goes on to fold the labour force, 'shitty cars', 'the dull monogamy of
the ocean' and eventually unfold an image of worship, desire and god within
each lover. This kind of poetic trajectory appears to be merely associative,
but it is clear that these poems are hard-won, come out of a socially
politicised and widely-read, an acutely aware, poetics. This is quirky,
original, astonishing writing.
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Feisty is the wrong word for Tim Cumming, but there has
always been a gritty urbanism about his work, a suppressed anger and furious
criticism in his engagement with the city, which has previously been the
focus of much of his work. The Rapture offers
not only a much wider array of subject matter, but also reveals a more gentle
side to Cumming's work, particularly in the nostalgic third section where
Cumming re-engages with Dartmoor as a child. Here, stories, geography,
childhood and family love and tension articulate place and memory with a shocking
clarity and precision.
Elsewhere, a harsh poetic music is broken up with gentler images of nature,
moments of emotion, and subject matter such as art and weather. This is still
rivetingly tough, mature poetry though, particularly in the section of improvisations
which reads as a centrepiece to this volume. I'm particularly drawn to
Cumming's Belgrade, a
City of scaffolding and
violins, coffee
grounds under the statues
of dictators
and voices on the party
line, summer rain
drumming through the city
of exhaust
into sheets of hail over
the Western suburbs
[from
'Belgrade Tram']
Adam Thorpe is a much more mainstream poet, and I often wonder what exactly
it is that draws me to his work, because they aren't in any way experimental
or innovative, just straightforward, well-crafted poems. This is the sort of
work I read to be reassured, to buy into shared emotion and experience: when
Thorpe remembers his father, I remember mine; when he articulates the life of
a writer, I buy into his geeky young self; when he offers up an image of a
painting made from words, I see the painting he describes. Sometimes I need
the ordinary, the emotive and straightforward, and Adam Thorpe can do that
stuff well.
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rob mclennan (sic; the lower case is his insistence, not
my mistake) is far from ordinary. He has an amazing writing and publishing
output, and cannot fail to be on the radar of any poetry reader paying
attention. From his Canadian base mclennan runs a pamphlet press, various
book fairs and events, online journals of both poetry and poetics, inbetween
travelling widely to book fairs, conferences and events around the world. En
route he enthuses, challenges and networks and leaves in his wake a fine
poetic output.
I've just caught up with his 2009 book, a compact of words, from Irish publisher Salmon, a book rooted in
domestic matters, including familial breakdown/break up. Much of mclennan's
work here is his trademark, or at least familiar, single or two line verses,
drawing on the ghazal as a form, with diverse images and ideas accruing
meaning as the poem goes on, but others are more straightforward and lyrical,
particularly the poems in 'blindness: seven poems for kate'. These are poems
which pick at mental and emotional scabs, states of being, poems which
articulate real life but aren't afraid to confuse and abuse the norm.
what is the difference
between song & burial
the difference of another
document
[from
'the wrong man']
grief notes perhaps continues
to chart a separation, but through an act of remembering and mourning. This
book is one sequence or set of poems, each including the book title and then
a further phrase. These are neither mawkish nor indulgent works, though,
these are clever articulations of memory and loss, doubt and at times
despair. Who hasn't, like mclennan been full of regret like this?:
I remember: whispers made
in sudden fields
as certain & as wrong
as words
[from 'grief
notes: weather,']
Slowly, slowly the poems build, through emotional aside, careful
consideration, rant and rave, articulate and inarticulate thought to the
final realisation that
hope is a four-letter
word
just as dangerous, a
further
street or river that then
leads sight, not the
future,
but realizing we have
one.
rob mclennan is original and hard-working, a writer who writes rather than
pontificates, a doer and a maker and grief notes: is one of his best books to date.
© Rupert
Loydell 2012
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