selected readings (script)
Blackwater Quartet
For this reading, I have selected a number of poems from the book cycle Blackwater Quartet. As the title suggests, the series consists of four books: Constructing the Human, Theories of Fugue, Tsunami Muses, and Adventures in the Gothic. The books were first published in a short-run edition of individual titles in 2004, but their availability is now somewhat restricted. In 2005, the books, together with a verse prologue, were published as a single-volume edition; the poems here are taken from this edition.
The first four poems are from Constructing the Human.
“Indian Summer” represents a formalised past, both in terms of prosody and address. Through a terza rima sonnet sequence, tenets of the past – the American South, a vanished civilisation, a sense of religious and historical entitlement – combine into a reflective present, a meditation on time itself, a common theme in my writing.
(reads) “Indian Summer”
“Degrees of Difficulty” personifies the past. The discovery of preserved human remains several years ago in the Alps, later identified as the Bronze Age ‘Ice Man’, caught the public imagination.
In the man’s clothing and personal effects we can identify a common heritage. Four thousand years disappear; we stand with him at the pass.
(reads) “Degrees of Difficulty”
“Conditions of Service” is part of the poem sequence “Versions of Sanctuary”. When I was growing up, in the late 50s and early 60s, the Cold War fossilised Soviet and Western Europe into two armed camps. The threat of nuclear war was always present. Even in the small Kentucky town where I lived, the basement of every public building was signed as a civil defence ‘fallout shelter’. I can still recall the siren alerts and practice evacuations, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when propaganda and counter-propaganda made the arrival of ‘Red’ warheads seem imminent.
(reads) “Conditions of Service”
The next poem “A Visitor at Madingley” was written following a visit to the Cambridgeshire Memorial to American servicemen who perished in World War II. The subject of the poem is an airman, a crew member of a B-17 Fortress flying from an unnamed East Anglian base. Surviving the loss of his bomber during a mission over Europe, in the period when the attrition rate of bomber causalities was particularly high, in middle age he has returned to the area, reflecting on the lives, and deaths, he remembers so clearly.
(reads) “A Visitor at Madingley”
The next poems are taken from the second book, Theories of Fugue.
“The Sirens” is a treatment of a tale from classical mythology, reconsidered in historical time. There were other treatments in the book on related themes, but this was one of the first. A tone of measured poignancy underlies the slow, irrevocable drift down to human scale.
(reads) “The Sirens”
There is a section in Theories of Fugue given to adaptations of poems by, principally, European writers: Brecht, Rilke, Rimbaud, with a nod to Neruda and the Anglo-Saxons (so-called old school writing I grew up with and still admire.).
The next poem I’ll read is an adaptation of a 9th century poem by the Chinese poet Po Chü-i. The poem is “The Lute Girl”.
(reads) “The Lute Girl”
In the next part of the book, the poems are more edgy, discordant, with an element of the surreal. The implausible is treated matter-of-factly. The two poems I’ve chosen as representative, are, “Remembering the Postmodern” and “Engaging Venus”.
(reads) “Remembering the Postmodern”
(reads) “Engaging Venus”
The final poem I’m going to read from Theories of Fugue is “Meridian”, itself taken from the poem sequence, “Souvenir Chakras”. It’s a reflection on human transience and Christian faith. It has about it, I think, something of the cold stone of English chapels.
(reads) “Meridian”
The next poems are taken from Book Three, Tsunami Muses.
They were written before those of Theories of Fugue, but for structural reasons I decided that Theories of Fugue should precede Tsunami Muses in the Blackwater cycle.
Generally, the poems in Tsunami Muses are thematically ‘off-centre’, in that the subject matter shape-shifts not only from poem to poem, but within each poem as well. Two poems from the first section represent this movement: “The Truth of These Materials” and “Names in Birth Order”.
(reads) “The Truth of These Materials”
(reads) “Names in Birth Order”
There are two further poems I want to read, to conclude this part of the Quartet. “Pavane for Lost Companions” and “Calculating pi” represent a dislocation of time, by definition through treatment of subject, philosophical intent, and the structure and development of language within the poems.
(reads) “Pavane for Lost Companions”
(reads) “Calculating pi”
The final book of Blackwater Quartet, Adventures in the Gothic, contains several poem sequences, including “Preludes for Prepared Piano”, “Twelve Non-Barbie Episodes”, and “Blood Motet”. I think that, compared to the highly structured work of the three previous books, the poems are more expansive in respect of subject matter and treatment, and rely more on tangential phrasing and imagery than strict prosody to sustain momentum in the writing.
Firstly, I’m going to read four selections from “Twelve Non-Barbie Episodes”. The poems have no specific titles, and are listed in the table of contents by their first lines only.
(reads) four selections
The next poem is taken from the penultimate section, “Partitas of the Soviet”. “The Interpretation of Dreams” is a kind of hyper-travelogue, or, as such things used to be known, a daydream.
(reads) “The Interpretation of Dreams”
The final poem I’m going to read from the Blackwater series is “Afterimages”. It has a first-person focus that serves to maintain the themes of grand (if flawed) isolation developed earlier in Adventures in the Gothic, and ends fittingly on a personal note in keeping with the nature of the reminiscence.
(reads) “Afterimages”
Relic Environments
The Relic Environments trilogy was written over a two year period 2005-2007. The books, Relic Environments, Available Light, and Designs for Living, contain many ‘persona’ poems, wherein the authorial voice is muted in favour of real or fictional characters from whose viewpoint the world, their world, real or imagined, is observed.
The poems may contain details from journals or letters, or from literary works themselves, interwoven with other original poetry to present a scene from life. The scene might be fixed in time, tableaux-like, or dynamic, expressing the life through a series of events that may in themselves represent historical circumstances, or dramatised to affect a particular resolution within the writing.
However, such writing is not exclusive to the books. Poems that arise directly from my own experience are present, too, albeit at times stylised to heighten the tension of written effects.
I’ll begin with two poems from series title, Relic Environments.
“The Wall” and “The English Beach” are examples not of poems with a metaphorical element within the structure, rather, of poems as metaphors.
(reads) “The Wall”
(reads) “The English Beach”
The following poems are referential to my opening comments about personae writing.
The first, “26 Piazza di Spagna”, is reductive, in that the somewhat flat, observational tone leads the reader along a decreasingly circuitous route to the door of the house in which John Keats died. We experience the condition of poetic intensity associated with the death, and recognise its achievement as a measure of immortality inexorably linked to the poems.
(reads) “26 Piazza di Spagna”
In the next poem, “Inquiries after Donne”, elements of metaphysical conceit are worked into a disturbed monologue whose sense and direction are not revealed until the closing lines. Even then, it is unclear if the speaker has spoken or imagined his situation while under duress, or if he has, as an extension of the conceit, created the environment in which the conceit can be manipulated to the purpose of heightened experience.
(reads) “Inquiries after Donne”
“1937” presents the chilling, off-hand brutality of mid 20c totalitarian bureaucracy within the context of a jovial reminiscence.
(reads) “1937”
In “Transitions of Plane in the Appearance of Attic Korai”, the narrative is more primitive and disturbing. The speaker is someone whose life and condition are beyond our present understanding, a world of gods ‘older than burials’.
(reads) “Transitions of Plane in the Appearance of Attic Korai”
In the last section of this book, I have adapted a series of poems by the 9th Century Chinese poet, Xu Xuanji, under the series title ‘Revelations of a Lesser Wife’, the title itself a reference to her role as a courtesan.
I have chosen five poems from the series to conclude the reading from this first book of the trilogy.
(reads) “To Secretary Liu”
(reads) “At Washing-Yarn Temple”
(reads) “Letter to Zian”
(reads) “For a Friend, Delayed by Heavy Rain”
(reads) “The Beautiful Orphans”
Available Light
In Available Light, Book 2 of the Relic Environments trilogy, the opening sequence of poems continues with the ‘persona’ themes begun in that first book of the series. There is a more detailed exploration of character and intent, in part because the subjects of the poems are drawn from life, or at least from a common literary and historical heritage. The opening section, titled “Studies in Caesura”, suggests disruption, a break or pause, in which we are given to observe the sweep of events within the artificial timeframe of poetry.
From this first section I’ve selected five poems that I think are representative of this idea of ‘a held breath’.
“A Forward Position” was written originally as a comment on one particular conflict, but which I set aside at the time as I couldn’t reconcile it with any other poem group. About five years later, when I was working on the trilogy, and in particular Available Light, it was revived and revised as a sounding board for the poems that followed in the opening sequence.
(reads) “A Forward Position”
The next poem I want to read is “A Timeline of the Conquest”. At first glance, it’s a ‘story’ poem: we follow the narrative of a shipwrecked, 16th c Spanish soldier in the Americas. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that during the time of his captivity, everything he held important in his own culture is as mist before the sun. There is an inevitability that reveals itself matter-of-factly in his asides to –whom? His countrymen? Himself? Or perhaps us, perhaps it is we who are the only witness to these events.
(reads) “A Timeline of the Conquest”
“Grendel and the Slayer”, the Anglo-Saxon tale of Beowulf, offers a characterisation of the beast Grendel. Again, we are silent observers at the edge of the crowd, yet are able to discern the least inclination of temperament and detail.
(reads) “Grendel and the Slayer”
From a sequence of poems titled “Variations on a Theme of Romantic Character”, I’ve chosen to read “The Exquisite Regard for Common Things” –the title itself taken from Dorothy Wordsworth. Indeed, the poem itself is a skewed axis. The usual centrifugal force of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge is stilled through Dorothy’s own presence. In her relationship with them, the philosophy becomes less fraught, insistent still, but with the greater inclination to apprehend the landscape rather than to confront it.
(reads) “The Exquisite Regard for Common Things”
I want to conclude this part of the Available Light with, again, another narrative that allows us privileged access to a series of events that occurred in the late 18th c in London. The events - bizarre, morbid - fix our attention, until it’s not clear if we are in fact observing them as they unfold during that hot summer day, or if we are, through the poem, participating in them.
(reads) “A Patent against Oblivion”
In the second part of the book, I’ve concentrated on a series of autobiographical poems. I think the writing of these poems allowed me to revisit ‘the condition of my youth’ from a distance of more than a quarter of a century. There is of course a degree of dramatic licence, but I think too there is a remit to interpret lives and events as they are remembered. It may be that having lived for so many years in England, these events and lives became fixed in my mind; however, I think it entirely plausible that my memory of these things is perhaps more accurate than for someone who continued living in that place, as they would have experienced the minute degradations of memory that could not be isolated from a continually evolving present.
(reads) “Curves of Pursuit”.
The final poem from this section of the book is “The Sky at Night”. It’s an elegy for my father. The aura of place is unmistakable, in that lives, landscape, and events become interchangeable. In the end, nothing is redeemed, but then, that was never the expectation.
(reads) “The Sky at Night”
The last section of Available Light is a treatment of events surrounding the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Soviet Ukraine in 1986. Interspersed with the narrative of scientific reports are interpretive translations of poems by the Russian poet Lyubov Sirota. She was living in the city of Pripyat, about 1.5km distant from Chernobyl, when the explosion occurred on April 26. She and her young son were among the tens of thousands evacuated from the area in the following days, and with them suffered the effects of radiation poisoning.
The poem “Resurrection Suite” is in three movements, and I will conclude the Available Light readings with the final section, “Dose Estimates”. It should be noted that to this day, Pripyat remains a dead city.
(reads) “Dose Estimates”
Designs for Living
In Designs for Living, the concluding book of the Relic Environments trilogy, the themes explored in the previous volumes crystallise into more symbolic forms. The landscapes that evolved as a condition of memory; the lives revisited in freeze-frame; the conflicts within which our sense of humanity was tested; are subsumed within a new self-knowledge. These symbols or ‘designs’ are rooted firmly in personal revelation, and represent the resolution of identity within the context of recovered time- that is to say, time’s immutability, recognised in the poems as patterns of memory and experience.
In the second book of this series, Available Light, I wrote a number of autobiographical poems, wherein the poetry allowed access to ‘a past life’ in another country, among people and places long disappeared or in all other respects, significantly changed; memory was the sole catalyst.
In the present volume, the opening poem, “The House”, reprises the themes of the earlier poems. However, its presence in Designs for Living indicates that a more immediate reconciliation is now possible. The degree of intimacy remains, but the haunted self of “Nones” and “The Sky at Night” has now achieved a resolution with past time and place.
(reads) “The House”
In the following poem, the medical facility to recreate physical features using the flesh and tissues of a corpse, is considered within the context of personal identity.
(reads) “A Face”
The next poem I want to read is, “Everything Else”. A walk on the beach after a storm provides the principal thread between points of representative observation - the crush of geological time a decoupage of footprints, seashell echoes, and antique aircraft over a seaside town.
(reads) “Everything Else”
I want to close this first part of Designs for Living with the poem, “Japanese Tattoos in the Edo Period”. A chronology of ancient techniques, seemingly, with attention given to each nuance of colour and nomenclature, it’s only in the closing lines that the narrator reveals the link to unrequited love through the process of symbolic pain. Perhaps more metaphorical than symbolic, but the road travelled is no less revealing for the journey.
(reads) “Japanese Tattoos in the Edo Period”
In the last part of the collection, in the poem sequence “Animus”, I have examined the morphology of particular folk tales. Within the raw energy of the narrative, we discover a moral dimension that is the fulcrum point of dramatic conflict within the story. I‘ll conclude this reading with the first movement of the section, “The Child-Eaters”, specifically, the metamorphosis of the tale known, in the Western canon, as ‘Red Riding Hood’.
(reads) selection from “The Child-Eaters”
(Notes end)