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Urban/Rural
Remains of a Future City,
Zoe Skoulding, (64pp, £7.99, Seren)
Messenger. New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, Ellen Bryant Voigt
(238pp, £8.99, Norton)
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An epigraph from Blixa Bargeld foreshadows the poems in
Zoe Skoulding's book: 'the new temples are already cracked / future ruins'.
And on the face of it, 'future ruins' are what she gives us, not only naming
'Building Site', but also enacting on the page the unfinished and chaotic
business of such places:
Between the
buildings
trees
reach down
to languages
of soil and worms,
leaves gloss argots of glass and steel
I've great admiration for writers who, as Zoe Skoulding does here, address
a single theme throughout a book. I enjoy the way in which various 'zones'
of a
city are suggested to her as titles by a particular source - Ivan
Chtcheglov's manifesto translated by Christopher Gray as Formula for a New
City. 'The Sinister Quarter', 'The Death
Quarter', 'The Useful Quarter': it must have been great fun inventing these
poems. In this last
Needing
Packets of nails
adhesive
grout
it's here we come
to shop fronts the same now for thirty years
blistered letters spelling out the family name
sheets of
wood hammered on the counter
where the formica wore off
from the
weight of advice
Fun too, to invent shapes for such poems: 'Tower' is a tall, thin poem with
small balconies; 'The Old Walls' is a solid poem, coursed like brickwork.
Five 'Columns' are a solid block of text running down (or I should say up?)
the centre of the page. And entertaining also, to generate poems by
navigating a place with the 'wrong' map to hand, as in 'Forest with A to Z of
Cardiff':
I bring gridlock
with me and
the forest
falls in line between
nowhere and
nowhere
But the poems address more than an urban landscape; they also reference their
own making, as in this slice out of the third of the 'Columns'
headlines grow a point size
fiction holds us in alignment
our views are justified despite
uneven spacing leaves fall
If cities are constructed from bricks, poems are constructed from words - and
this parallel is elegantly made in 'Reconstruction', a poem which appears to
be talking about re-building when it opens
The days you
forget how the bricks
were piled up
all over again,
their edges
just where they were before
as if nothing
had happened
but by the third stanza has shifted to words, using form in a
house-that-Jack-built way to reconstruct the poem - and add extensions stanza
by stanza:
The words
fell down
and nobody
knew what happened
to the places
that bricks
were not the
edges of. Making them again
meant
bricking up the way things were before,
so that
nothing could ever be different.
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I admire these poems more and more as I appreciate their
manoeuvres and ambiguities. This is in a completely different way from how I
respond to Ellen Bryant Voigt's writing in Messenger. The opening poem 'The Hen' (from 1976),
describing a chicken being killed, itself points to that difference. Of the
decapitated and pulsing body, she writes
...I knew it
was this
that held
life, gave life
and not the
head with its hard contemplative eye.
- so I'll say it was with a contemplative eye that I was reading Remains
of a Future City, whereas Messenger gets me in the pulsing body. Of course I'd expect
to be drawn to poems with a rural setting, poems about fields and farmers and
animals, and there are plenty of these for me to enjoy: 'Why isn't he out in
the fields, our common passion?' she asks of her sleeping father in 'The
Visit'. It's not the subject matter that holds me (and anyway the range is
far greater: piano playing and teaching are recurrent themes; snakes, too)
but the writing. 'Grace' is one of the words on the back cover that seems to
me to have it right. But now I have to say what it is I think constitutes
that 'grace'.
It's twofold. First, there's both elegance and flow in the language. You can
pick up the book at random and read it aloud and not falter. Let me test
this, with a random dip (and the book is well-made for dipping, opening
easily, with lots of white space) - 'Talking the Fire Out, 5':
Who can
distinguish knowledge
and belief?
Against
the dangers
in your own house,
you take up
every weapon -
Listen:
my father
killed a copperhead
with a
switch. Out fishing,
coming on it
by the pond, knowing
the exact
angle and trusting it,
he flicked
the weed against its back
as he had
often cast his lean line
over
secretive waters.
It's interesting that I only needed to glance once at the text to be able to
type it out - it sounds natural.
Secondly, the writing's pared down. I don't mean minimal - rather, stripped
back to what is essential, so that
is what fills the space of a poem. It's the fierce honesty of the writing
that strikes me in 'Lesson' - a more recent poem from Shadow of
Heaven about her mother, seen over a long
period of time. It opens
Whenever my
mother, who taught
small
children forty years,
asked a
question, she
already knew
the answer.
'Would you
like to' meant
you would....
and moves forward in time to a crisis, when the daughter acknowledges her own
tactic for dealing with her mother and says
I...
made my face
a freshly
whitewashed
wall: let her
write, again,
whatever
she wanted
there.
The voice is objective and unsparingly open - poems of rural life don't in
any way idealise it. 'The Farmer' shows his strengths are also his
limitation: 'everything he knows is practical', which is stifling for his
wife. 'The Trust' is a particularly haunting poem: after neighbours' lambs
have been killed, in his own dog's mouth a farmer finds
wound around
the base of the back teeth - squat molars
the paws
can't reach to clean - small coils of wool,
fine and
stiff, like threads from his own jacket.
The farmer has to shoot his own dog. The poem's as unsentimental as it is
exact, rich in details where it needs to be (the 'evidence' round the teeth)
but driving unflinchingly forward to the dog, 'his best companion in the
field for seven years', being shot. The last 6 lines of the poem however are
given over to understanding what happens in dogs such as this: the event's
distressing, but there's much more to it than that.
Although she opens the 1987 collection The Lotus Flowers with a poem about teaching, 'The Last Class', like
this
Put this in
you notebooks:
All verse is
occasional verse.
and although many poems are
occasioned by significant events and moments and family memories, Ellen
Bryant Voigt has also undertaken longer sequences of poems, including the
1995 book-length Kyrie. Several
voices speak in these poems (some through letters, prayers or incantations)
to build up a sense of the 1918 pandemic in which 'You wiped a fever-brow,
you burned the cloth. / You scrubbed a sickroom floor, you burned the mop.'
A sequence, 'Variations: at the piano' from the previous book also takes a
long perspective. Its final couplet is striking (I keep coming across
striking phrases that make me stop and savour them):
Digging a
hole to where the past is buried,
one covers
the living grass on either side.
What's so remarkable is that this writing doesn't in any way cover over the
'living grass'. So it's unsurprising (turning again to the cover) to find
Ellen Bryant Voigt has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the
Pulitzer Prize.
© Jane Routh 2009
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