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In 'The Waste Land' T.S. Eliot played with a
long standing notion that the written word should reflect the way people
speak. This was one of the premises of modernism. Today our elaborate
communicative devices have led to examples of text, sext and
facebook-trolling finding their way into British poetry. Here are four tender
lines from Sophie Robinson:
I think of you urgent and
weak walking beside
billboards, missing out,
flaking off in the
silence between 2 traxx,
no tender riot
in yr geekheart
Here's Amy Blackmore at her
school prom:
Balloons like swollen
growths inhabit the orange shadow
The guy from It is DJing
-
J20 at the bar
However none of these colloquial expression, or even the shallows of modern
life, have shaken hands with Toby Martinex de las Rivas, instead, reading the
Faber new poet's first collection is like walking pissed into an
undergraduate lecture on Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica. Profound ideas pass by with the
serenity of blank clouds. It is a pleasant trip until the stuffy tone of the
lecturer, his halitosis and mouldy jumper spread into each other, mingling
into incomprehensible dissipation.
Either bravely or stupidly, TMdlR's language deliberately shuts out the
temporally contemporary world. If Faber put out Terror as a collection of
John Dunne's juvenilia, the Holy Spirit would not bat an eyelid. There can be
no doubt that whatever John Dunne wrote at 13, although more than 500 years
old, would still be worthwhile. This can help explain why TMdlRs verse is
worthwhile, though written at the age of 36, the world is still spinning in
the same direction.
However IÕm not impressed by Martinez reliance on obscure, antiquated words.
There are numerous examples he can only have spirited away from hoary
biblical scrawl found on weekend caravan crusades to Mount Sinai. 0.006% of
the UK population currently read new poetry and of those eight people only
one will know the meaning of 'asperities, viscera, fritillity' etc, that
person is this books author.
In opposition to this verbal complexity look at the way Pablo Neruda carves a
carnal heaven with simple and emotive words (even simpler in his
mother tongue) in
'Agua Sexual':
Rolling in big solitary
raindrops,
in drops like teeth,
in big thick drops of
marmalade and blood,
rolling in big raindrops,
the water falls,
like a sword in drops,
like a tearing river of
glass,
it falls biting,
striking the axis of
symmetry, sticking to the seams of the soul,
breaking abandoned
things, drenching the dark.
Whereas Toby Martinex de las Rivas' treatment of a similar theme is
completely different, in his poem 'Water':
In the blue plastic water
butt, a false night quivers
with larvae: fear wakens
in a face that ignores me for
the sky, unsmiling,
ringed by a halo the bud-headed
branches creep into
Something clarified in her in the last days, recalling her brother's
consumption, her own face held above dark& rising water: how it had been
a kind of public drowning by proxy.
Here the water is murkier, but no worse and no less profound. There is a deep
reflection rippling across the pool. The strength of Toby Martinez de las
Rivas poetry lies nested somewhere in this deliberate obscurity, it is sword
fashioned from his own mental steel. His approach to poetry is self-taught,
no matter how much money Gilian
Grafton may jealously believe Faber stuff into the boots of their young
poets.
Though at first Toby Martnez de las Rivas word choices seem jarring and odd,
they serve a purpose. They add a tension to the poetry, pushing the shallow
reader away and the deeper reader into deeper rivers.
However the fireworks come when
Toby Martinez de las Rivas puts down his metaphysical pen and raises his
physical pen. In 'Simonsburn' and 'Penititentail Rain' he discovers erotic
love is no less holy than divine love. This sensual treatment of love is the
strongest wave rushing through Terror, it feeds a guilty desire for the flesh, and
the intensity of the poetry is pushed to breaking point whenever a female
form enters the fray. The black and red of the cover invoke the devil, guilt
is what pushes the poey further, however because of pop culture's internet
addled music video starlet pornographic excesses; his guilt comes across as
noble and old fashioned.
The collection closes with a
poem without words. A sonnet with the words deleted and only the punctuation
left:
(cloud)
,
,
, ,
, , ,
,
,
, ,
, , ,
,
, ,
,
, ,
, , ,
,
,
, ,
, , ,
,
, ,
, ,
(cloud)
The apostrophes dance around the empty space,
there is a cadence, subtly, the realization dawns here that there is no need
for language, contemporary or antiquated, there is only the calm, svelte
surface of a pond, where heaven pours through the spiritual body. I doubt
TMdlRs is the first poet to write a blank poem and I doubt he will be the
last. I sometimes wish he would write more. I sometimes wish he would write
less.
© Charlie
Baylis 2014
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