Satyajit Sarna

Two drunk sailors sat
on the prow of the ship and sang
a long song of travel and adventure.
Jonah spoke of Natural History with aplomb.

Sucking on lemons,
Their voices were sharp and salty
Vibrating through the purple night.

It seemed to them that the ship was piloting itself,
Ploughing towards the horizon,
The sails neatly trimmed
And they waited and the ghost ship went on south.

Twenty years later, on an acre in Bruges,
Ploughing the dark soil,
I met Jonah, whose eyes were tired and needed rest
Before he knew where he would go next.

Riddle

So what do you say to a five-year-old
who’s realised that everything will die?
You fight it, but no matter how you try
you still repeat the lies that you were told.

It was last year in summer, the fields were gold,
etc. Had there been cotton, it would’ve been high.
His frame is retching with the question why.
But soon the old words work and he’s consoled.

And as the clever lies dispelled his fit,
arrived here with great speed, now at his back,
a towering black wave was about to hit.

I held his eye and the wave froze in the air.
He wandered off to play. The watery stack
remained for anyone who had a care.

______________

For Evan & Jonas, Brewers

…tant ilz me firent boire

1.
I remember a saucepan of such size
that you could boil a large-ish dog in it
with room to spare. I remember my surprise
at the copper element shaped to fit
its depth, on both ends garden hoses tightened
that slapped and slathered across the work top.
I remember how a two-year old recited
the recipe, how his father at the sink
smiled but corrected him with Cascade hop,
how snow was coming down (it was December),
how I said yes to all suggestions, the clink
of glass on glass on glass. I remember
little else, so much they made me drink.

2.
Next thing I’m lying on the soft hillside.
(White rugs have been spread out in my neighbourhood.)
I’m watching snowflakes in their millions glide
out of some origin in the space above.
I’ve moved from the cold edge of everything
to the centre, radiant, suddenly
at one with truth. I seem to hear it sing.
The night. The snow. The city. It’s all good.
Then I realise as yet more snow descends
that if I don’t get up eventually
I won’t get up at all, which seems profound.
But before I prise myself from the ground
and shake the snowdrifts off my cloak and shanks,
I make a note to set down these events
as fully as I can, by way of thanks.

______________

Justin Quinn’s latest collection is Close Quarters (Gallery). He lives in Prague.

Image Copyright: Ann Kristin Kåsin

Raw Material
Derek Mahon
Gallery Press, Paperback; 79 pages
ISBN: 978 1 85235 523 4
Price: £10.50

George Potts

‘An important school of thought (Nabokov and Ted Hughes for example) has always insisted on literal translation’, writes Derek Mahon.. Adhering to a concept of translation  markedly different from that of Nabokov and Hughes, he explains that his most recent volume of translated poems are ‘poems adapted from their originals … to make something not only respectable but also readable, and perhaps re-readable, in a different language’. This volume’s title, like that of his earlier Adaptations (2006), makes clear that a poem of Rilke’s or Pushkin’s is for Mahon a  resource to be mined by a later poet, with which to build another poem without worrying about the fallacy of perfect translation.

Mahon has devoted much of his life to translation, and Raw Material can be seen as a continuation from earlier works such as Words in the Air (1998) and Adaptations. However his range of languages has never been as all-encompassing as it is in here. In 79 pages we move from familiar territory such as Ovid and Rimbaud to Jorge Guillén and the poetry of the Tang dynasty. Included as well are a series of ‘translations’ from the fictional Indian poet Gopal Singh, a creation of Mahon’s who also featured in An Autumn Wind (2010).

The strength of Mahon’s later output – particularly of his work since the 1990s – is a matter of critical debate. Mahon’s endless revision of his work has not helped matters; in the years between Collected Poems (1999) and New Collected Poems (2011) numerous works have been revised, renamed and re-published in other collections. This has confused even Mahon’s most devoted readers. Almost all the poems in Raw Material have already been published elsewhere: ‘Ariadne on Naxos’ in Life on Earth, ‘The Lady from the Sea’, ‘The Clifden Road’, ‘Antrim Road’ and several others in An Autumn Wind. The result is utterly baffling for the reader, who has no idea which book to turn to for what, and is left only with the impression that half these poems will have changed again by the time Mahon’s next volume is released.

Hugh Haughton’s The Poetry of Derek Mahon offers a compelling insight into Mahon’s conception of translation. Commenting upon ‘The Seaside Cemetery’ (from Valéry’s ‘Le Cimetière Marin’), Haughton dwells upon several lines of Mahon’s translation:

But even as fruit consumes itself in taste,
even as it translates its own demise
deliciously in the mouth where its form dies

‘In making “the fruit consume itself in taste”’, Haughton notes, Mahon ‘draws on the self-involved simile … and draws attention to the self-involvement of the poet in translation’. Mahon warns us that the act of translation, in always involving the translating poet, cannot avoid the transformation and appropriation associated with the poet’s interpretation of the source.

A fine instance of Mahon’s ‘adaptation’ theory of translation would be ‘Antrim Road’. We are told the poem is ‘from the French of Charles Baudelaire’, although it is set in Belfast in a ‘suburban house’ when the ‘fiery evening sun’ burns down upon ‘mushy peas and spuds’. The minutiae of the poem’s images (‘white homework’, ‘bottle ships’) and its perfectlyjudged half rhymes (‘clock’/‘book’, ‘hot’/‘hut’) beautifully capture the peace and domesticity of Mahon’s childhood:

A ‘Dresden’ figurine next to the clock
holding her skirt out as she reads a book.

The line echoes ‘A Bangor Requiem’ (originally titled ‘Death in Bangor’, another irritating revision), Mahon’s earlier elegy on the death of his mother and his Northern Irish heritage:

with your wise monkeys and ‘Dresden’ figurines,
your junk chinoiserie and coy pastoral scenes

Which poem of Baudelaire’s has been adapted by Mahon we are not told, which is a shame. While Mahon’s poem seems wholly sui generis, that it is included in a volume of translations tells the reader this is not the case; Baudelaire’s original poem is surely useful in understanding what Mahon is doing in ‘Antrim Road’. Why bother to inform the reader that this is a translation if it is a translation so radically different as to make the source is unrecognisable?

If ‘Antrim Road’ is Mahon appropriating French poetry into the language of his native Ireland, his translations of Michelle Houellebecq offer an interesting contrast to this. Houellebecq, the internationally renowned French novelist, lived for several years on the west coast of Ireland (which features in his award-winning novel Atomised). Houellebecq’s poems ‘La Longue Route de Clifden’, translated in Raw Material by Mahon, is set on Ireland’s west coast:

À l’ouest de Clifden, promontoire
Là où le ciel se change en eau
Là où l’eau se change en mémoire
Tout au bord d’un monde nouveau

Le long des collines de Clifden,
Des vertes collines de Clifden,
Je viendrai deposer ma peine.

Mahon adapts this poem as ‘The Clifden Road’:

West of Clifden on a cliff
where sky changes into sea
and sea to memory as if
at the edge of a new world

on the long hills of Clifden
the green hills of Clifden
I will lay down my grief.

The poem was also recently translated into English by Delphine Grass and Timothy Matthews, in The Art of Struggle. If we compare the opening of their translation, ‘The Long Road to Clifden’, with Mahon’s version:

West of Clifden, headland,
Where the sky changes to water
Where water changes to memory
At the edge of a new world

Along the hills of Clifden
The green hills of Clifden
I shall lay down my pain.

There are several choice words in the two translations. Mahon translates ‘promontoire’ as ‘cliff’ rather than the more literal ‘headland’, which Grass and Matthews use. The geographical location of the poem is technically a headland:  Sky Road, ‘west of Clifden’ on the Irish coast from which one can gaze out onto the Atlantic Ocean. Mahon’s choice of ‘cliff’ offers little apart from the rather monotonous echo of ‘cliff’ and ‘Clifden’.

The main issue in Mahon’s translation is his choice of title. Grass and Matthews translate the title literally as ‘The Long Road to Clifden’; Mahon chooses ‘The Clifden Road’. Mahon’s title seems rather plain; in dropping the word ‘long’, it loses that sense of enduring struggle that is so important to Houellebecq’s poem. ‘Peine’, translated as ‘pain’ or ‘grief’ in these two versions, is transcended in some way as one gazes out at the Atlantic Ocean. Houellebecq is looking to Ireland’s west-coast as a source of redemption much as he does at the ending of Atomised and the road to this redemption is made all the more poignant for being a long one.

There are many wonderful poems in this Raw Material, including ‘Antrim Road’, ‘A Hot October’ and the magnificent ‘A Window’ (‘a rustling poplar makes a visible breeze, / the twilight describes a circle of peace / and a soaring sky adapts to my own horizon’). If there is a criticism to be made, it is that so much of this volume has been published before and that this is not made clear anywhere in it. Those who own other recent Mahon books such as Adaptations and An Autumn Wind may be disappointed to buy Raw Material and find much that they’ve read before.

For those who have not invested in those volumes Raw Material contains much to be enjoyed, in particular the translations of the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, which are published here for the first time. If there is one thing Mahon’s readers can hope it is that he stops incessantly revising his own work, a fear Mahon seems to recognise in ‘A Year of Grace’ from this collection: ‘I’ll never write so well again, / only the same poems over and over’.

Shivani Mutneja

Fashion dirt on my feet

———————-one night we will rob decades of memory

Clock-time conspires erasure

———————-the cars will run without fuel

Focal sex knuckles imagination

———————-we will kiss breaths out of each other

Cohen nudges it

———————-the skies will trickle down photographs of mobs

Towns spill over cities

———————-we will make love to vanishing landscapes and smother the roots.

Thoughts and a conversation

By and with Gareth Evans

Deborah Levy’s writing sits hothouse and unsettlingly, provocatively at odds with its British surroundings. Internationally lensed in its lineage, looking, longing and latitudes – her prose, play-scripts, performance texts (different), puppet pitches, broadcast dispatches, poems and pieces in general convey versions of otherness with a sensual, exploratory, even uncanny tone and insight that is virulently absent elsewhere on these almost benighted islands.

A woman – no doubt at all of this – who would be extremely pleased to find herself at table with the likes of Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Lee Miller, Francesca Woodman and Angela Carter, Levy has, since the 1980s, delivered a series of fissure fables, parables of a fertile withholding, that speak to – and of – the always unstable terrain between the skin, the worn, the spoken (the public surface) and the altogether more unknowing, unknowable and finally unsayable pits, caves, abysses and marshes (land or water, who can say) of the sub- and un-conscious.

A poet of instincts and the insight that comes from reading objects, moments, moods, gazes and gauzes with the full and fully eroticised (far from merely sexual) spectrum awareness of a singular encounter in the colonnades of evening, Levy wanders nomadically across and into forms, a tactile tunesmith with a razor for a pitching-fork.

Her novel Swimming Home, the first long form prose work in a decade and a half, draws on long years’ reflection on how the dysfunction of the domestic dramatic – the ambiguously indexed, constantly shifting and coded spaces that host both action and the passive-aggressive interior pause – informs the most profound urgencies of the contemporary human being as they seek, often desperately (and more or less evidently) to become. This book is a volume on the valency of yearning, in all its rainbow hues.

You’ll have to read it for its plot – it’s not spoken of here – and plumb its opening paragraph for a glitteringly precise convocation of Levy’s strategic intentions. Before and after you read the book, however, please raise your full glass to collaborative publishers And Other Stories for their proud backing of this most definitely ‘other’ story.

***

Gareth Evans: I’m thinking first of the psycho-pathology of the swimming pool, and primarily in a filmic sense; your writing after all is inherently cinematic, where that means deep seeing, a rich mise-en-scene, the often unspoken, a precise point-of-view… So, Ozon’s Swimming Pool; The Swimmer (John Cheever’s story but, maybe even more, Frank Perry’s filmic adaptation; Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty; Lucrecia Martel’s stagnant drama La Cienaga; Deray’s La Piscine; Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated. What is your own sense of the importance of this primal (birthing) zone?

Deborah Levy: You are referring to the central metaphor in my book, which is set around a swimming pool in the south of France. Pools are a kind of theatre with exits and entrances. We do quite literally have ‘costumes’, but we are nearly naked too.

Pools are small societies and we are asked personally to define our place in them. We are streamed into lanes: slow, medium and fast. As it happens, I am quite a strong swimmer and belong in the fast lane, but I like to warm up in the slow lane and then cross over to the fast. Sometimes I can see that my fellow swimmers don’t approve of the kind of social mobility I have bestowed upon myself, especially in Britain, where the class system is very defined.

A pool is a public place but also a private place – we can always stick our head under water.  When I swim under water (as I do every day) my body stretches, muscles relax, and I find that random thoughts surface and drift as I do the lengths. Swimming helps me get in to a way of thinking that is useful for writing a novel. But the main conceptual design in Swimming Home is that a swimming pool, no matter how posh, is just a hole in the ground and so, of course, in my book Joe points out that a pool resembles a grave. My title, Swimming Home, refers to this; also in part to the way we start life in water.

And cinema, yes; Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (from the Cheever), with an incandescent performance from an athletic, ageing Burt Lancaster, was a major inspiration. It is a bleak story told in a cunningly light-hearted tone…“The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.”

I noted the almost transcendental ways in which Cheever conceals and discreetly reveals Ned’s circumstances and state of mind as he tries to swim home through the glittering blue pools of suburban Connecticut. I wanted to have a go at this tone… Muriel Spark also has a breezy, light touch, but her heart of darkness casts a shadow across all her pages. It’s taken me a while to realize that Spark was a great writer.

I was also thinking about Godard’s Le Mépris / Contempt (1963), adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo , published in English as The Ghost at Noon. This was an indirect influence, but I was intrigued by how, in it, Brigitte Bardot is directed to be almost angry about her beauty. Here, I was thinking about my character Kitty Finch, who is always being stared at and scrutinized by every character in my book.

Some of Le Mépris is set in a villa in Capri and it is here that the Bardot character accelerates the contempt she feels for her writer husband, who is using her physical beauty as bait to get himself a job. So there is a bit of Joe’s wife Isabel in there, because she uses Kitty’s beauty to attempt to free herself from her philandering husband.

The other film that kept returning to me while I was writing was Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, centered as it is around the absurd rituals of a group of middle-class people. Along with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, all of these contributed to the kind of melancholy and gently accumulating panic in the sunshine that I wanted to create for Swimming Home.

GE: Can you then consider Swimming Home’s relationship to cinema, in terms of both narrative space and screenwriting form?

DL: When I began writing Swimming Home, its structure began to unfold like a film. I saw it cinematically. I experienced it cinematically. Actually I was quite worried about this because  some of the pleasures and challenges of writing fiction lie in playing around with time but, in Swimming Home, time is more or less chronological, except for one formal intervention it its design, which is when I repeat the moment of Kitty and Joe together in the car on a mountain road.

I certainly do have a cinematic, rather than literary, internal language when I am writing. I think in terms of close ups and wide shots; I construct scenes and light them, as it were. I arrange key objects in certain positions and return to them again for another view, but in the end I’m just a nerdy writer of fiction and want every sentence to do something exciting. I know how much it takes for a writer to snare my own attention and I am a brutal editor of my own work. I sometimes wonder if this is a gift or a fatal flaw.

As it happens, I have been commissioned to write my first feature film, and I find it is a language I can do very easily. I love it…and then, at the same time, I kind of miss language. Obviously, film is mostly a visual language, but that’s a whole other story.

GE: How much do you ventriloquise for, or are you are ventriloquised by, your characters?

DL: Characters. Their task is to think for me and to embody certain kinds of human behaviours. They are masks and, at the same time, there is a part of myself in all my characters in Swimming Home. I mean, I could write an academic essay on the ideas all my minor and major characters have to carry for me in a fiction, but that’s not what I have chosen to do.

On the other hand, there is some weird shamanistic stuff that goes on with writing characters and, I have to say, I don’t want to get too theoretical about this. Freud’s favourite quote was from the French neurologist Charcot, something like, “theory is good but it doesn’t stop things from happening.” I entirely agree.

Just to get some reality levels organized here; I am aware that my characters are doing and saying things for the plot and for poetry and comedy and politics; but God, it’s so exciting when they reveal something I did not know that I knew.

For example, when I first started to write Swimming Home, Kitty Finch was noisily a bit mad but I began to realize the old cliché was true. It’s the quiet ones we watch…and I began to understand that one of the central characters was too quiet about the things that hurt him most. It was his silence that kind of gave me the story.

You know, I quite miss hanging out with the characters in Swimming Home. I haven’t really separated from them yet. There are days I wake up and worry that there is more to do with Kitty Finch for example, and sometimes I wonder if there is a sequel…but then I think, no Deborah, you don’t write sequels. And then I wonder why I have cast myself in this way. Why not write a sequel?

I have stern conversations with myself about this and they go something like, well, if you think there’s more to do with Kitty Finch, why didn’t you do it; perhaps she is not explored sufficiently in the original? And then I understand, all over again, that she does what she needs to do in Swimming Home. If there were more for her to do, she would have done it. So there we go…you can hear me ventriloquising all over the place.

GE: In light of this, the qualities, possibilities and limits of ‘performance’ run through all your work. How do you think about this in Swimming Home?

DL: Well, I had theatre training, and avant-garde theatre training to boot (although I did not know it at the time) at Dartington College of Arts. I was a very bookish sort of young woman but, as well as reading Jane Austen in my first year, I was reading Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and his rhapsodic, furious essays, in particular Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, which is one of the most bruising and truthful stretches of writing ever produced.

Anyway, it was pretty strange that, for someone who wanted to be a writer, I was taught by the leading exponents of postmodern dance, Steve Paxton and Mary Faulkerson. I was just a lumpen know-nothing, a vaguely punkish 18 year old from West Finchley (punk singer Poly Styrene, whose real name was Marion Elliot Said, was my total heroine) but I was asked questions I had never considered before, and which I still regard as the most subversive  of questions for a writer to consider;  how is the human skeleton aligned; what are the mechanisms involved in standing and sitting and falling; is it possible to have a ‘neutral’ body; what is our relationship with gravity; how do we breathe; where are we looking; how are we looking; why are we looking; what part of the body do we lead with when we walk?

All of this was very useful when I was teaching animation script-writing at the Royal College of Art; and it is a useful forensic tool to look at how certain kinds of political values and psychologies are embodied too. There is that phrase for feeling superior: she had her ‘nose in the air.’ Well, it comes from somewhere concrete and real.

So, in a way, perhaps I do approach all my work ‘performatively’. That is to say, I am interested in behaviour, and writing is always a kind of behaviour.

GE: Do you feel you have a ‘project’, across all the media you work in?

DL: No, not really; I have no comfort-zone as a writer. Perhaps I should settle into one and have an easier life? Ok; I do have a project across all the media I work in, these being fiction, theatre, film, poetry. One of the things writers are supposed cleverly to chase is coherence. Coherence is the bloody mauled fox, the trophy the author proudly brings to the table for her readers.

And yet we do not have coherent desires, and our most confronting thoughts do not come out in articulate, clever sentences. We say things we do not mean, do things we do not understand, slam doors for reasons we do not entirely comprehend. We love things that are not good for us. As a writer, when I get near to the things I cannot articulate, and then a bit closer, the work starts to roar. It might be that my project is to find a language that does not sanitize and flatten and fix the more fragile, strange, incomprehensible ways in which we experience being alive, or half dead, or whatever.

GE; Indeed, in that regard, I was struck by an observation made about your book by Laura Elkin. She wrote that “the point isn’t the plot, or Levy’s language, or the deliberate yet casual strokes drawn between the characters that delineate their relationships and needs. What Swimming Home points to is the insufficiencies and failures of language and storytelling to get across what we really mean: our urgencies, our worries, our fears” (read the full assessment at http://maitresse.typepad.com/maitresse/2012/01/swimming-home-by-deborah-levy.html).

DL:Yes, the story is about all of this. And at the same time is a highly plotted story.

GE: What then do you feel your creative ‘purpose’ is? I don’t mean message, but perhaps your own ‘desire’…

DL: My creative purpose is to be alert to the things that interest me and to work out how to link one thing to another in mind-blowing ways. How things connect with other things is what I want to know more about, and that’s most of the pleasure of writing and reading.

My desire in Swimming Home was to give all the characters existential equality. That is not a very English thing to say, but what I mean is that there is not much sly moral judging going on in Swimming Home. I am not encouraging the reader to hate the hyper-realism of Madeleine Sheridan and love Kitty Finch, who has to put up a fight for the way she exists in the world, well documented by R.D. Laing for example.

More generally, my desire is not to have a writing mind that is ‘made up’, which is not to pretend that I don’t have opinions and affinities and arguments to chase. I think most people would agree that it is sometimes agonising to feel things; and we spend quite a lot of energy trying not to feel things. Well, I am interested in what we replace not feeling things with. That is my subject and in a way it was a writer like Alain Robbe-Grillet’s subject too.

So we can replace our desire not to feel with heroin or ideology or train-spotting or the way we hold a knife and fork, or with the design of a building or with various mysterious symptoms that make us suffer when we walk to the bus stop. If all this sounds like I have mostly been reading Freud – which I have – I am dramatizing two of his most iconic case histories it’s a massive, subtle, very hard job in the end, I’m with Henry James most of the way: “it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”

It’s a bit pathetic probably, but I don’t know of any substitute either. There are nice things like sex and swimming and drinking wine with friends, but in the end my desire is to be alone writing again. It is the way I feel less alone actually, and that’s all messed up too, but it’s how it is.

GE: Finally, could you talk a little about your being part of And Other Stories,in terms of it being a reader-active, translation-central operation?

DL: And Other Stories historically represents exactly the right literary provocation at the right time. What they have achieved is extraordinary in such a cynical publishing atmosphere. We know that to make something innovative and substantial happen in art or science or education – or human rights for that matter – always comes down to a few remarkable and driven people.

Stefan Tobler is a passionate publisher with great tastes and instincts. He is serene, astute and he is using everything the 21st Century offers to introduce readers to the blazing international literature he and the highly skilled AOS core team champion.

It’s quite sad to see how decent people involved in mainstream literary publishing have become toadies to the perceived tastes of the ‘market’. This is all due for a change and everyone knows it. The international Occupy movement has so astutely chimed with popular disgust at an exhausted and failing corporate culture. If I let ‘the market’ write my books for me and tell me what I think and how you think and what we are like, what kind of conversation would I be having with my readers? What kind of conversation would they be having with me?

Furthermore, the reading groups that AOS are in conversation with have read lots of international literature and presumably speak quite a few languages- they represent a big exciting world. I will never forget the shock of reading an article in a respected broadsheet newspaper in which Ian Jack laid in to the distinguished academic Gabriel Josipovici, author of Whatever Happened to Modernism, and then he somehow felt entitled enough to take the piss out of what he saw as his foreign name. In this context the reading groups are essential.

***

Deborah Levy’s work can be very helpfully encountered at www.deborahlevy.co.uk

Swimming Home will be BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime (10.45pm) from Monday 27^th February.

Thanks to all at And Other Stories.

Gareth Evans is a writer, curator and editor (www.gotogetherpress.com; www.artevents.info). He is Adjunct Film Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, current Writer-in-Residence for Jerwood Visual Arts and the Co-Producer of the essay film Patience (after Sebald), currently on UK release with Soda Pictures (www.nbcq.co.uk; www.sodapictures.com).

On the Side of the Crow
Christien Gholson
Parthian Books, Paperback,
69 pages, 978-1931236553, £7.99

Nikolai Duffy

Christien Gholson’s On the Side of a Crow is a short collection of loosely connected prose poems that conjure drifting worlds and scenes, many of which scatter into shift and fade. It is a quiet and subtly affecting collection with narrative at its heart, frequently fantastic yet also deceptively familiar. A sense of the absurd runs through the majority of the narratives, together with a sense of the fabulous and the fabled.

In interview Gholson has commented how much of his poetry ‘makes connections by juxtaposition or in the flow of the overall pattern’ and it’s certainly a statement of poetics which applies well to On the Side of the Crow. These connections, between individual pieces across the collection as well as, often, within individual pieces themselves, often resemble the shape and thread of a musical score. Gholson has cited the influence of jazz on his writing but he might just as easily refer to fugues or arias, anything with an insistent melody which repeats and keeps check of each digression and deviation. In Gholson this melody is both formal and thematic. Even in its shifts and folds, both the collection as a whole, as well as each of its constitutive parts, is patterned into a coherent weave. A strand begins, shifts, moves off, before being reclaimed by the same recognisable melody, quietly insistent.

Given this impressive structural layering, it is perhaps surprising that On the Side of the Crow is actually Gholson’s first book. But it is also a book that has gone through a long creative process and, as with most things, patience pays off. First drafted back in 1994, Gholson revised the collection in 2001 before it was taken up by the New York-based Hanging Loose Press and first published in 2006. Parthian’s recent reissue of the collection coincides with their publication of Gholson’s first novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind and introduces his earlier work to British readers, on whose shores he currently resides. Yet in spite of this relatively lengthy back story to the collection, one of the most noticeable features about On the Side of the Crow is its uncanny ability to strike a frequently contemporary note.

Much of this contemporaneity has to do with the way in which a number of the poems in the collection revolve around the fictional character Mae Sistore, a radical poet wanted by the FBI, who, through word and weave, repeatedly aims to inspire a silent revolution. In ‘30^th Street Station, Philadelphia: Scene Painted Inside an Incoherent Loudspeaker’, where ‘National guardsmen stand at the entrance of every quay, scanning faces, fingers resting lightly on the triggers of their weapons,’ Mae Sistore sits on a bench next to a young mother and cautions quiet. Elsewhere, Sistore delivers radio broadcasts advocating that the time for change has arrived.

In a blog post for Parthian, Gholson has written how Sistore ‘could have been my antidote to the frustration I felt over the complacency that had settled over America during the Nineties. A massive vigil of silence seemed more powerful than any slogan I could come up with.’

As the collection develops – and in the wake of Sistore’s softly insistent example – people begin, simply, to gather together, to collect on the streets of capitals across America but doing so, crucially, without holding up signs or chanting slogans or making demands. This is a silent occupation and, as one of poems early on in the collection puts it, ‘Silence can be an empty white room with closed windows or it can be a rock dropped through a canyon’s shadow.’ In their own ways, both have the potential to challenge and change.

This idea of a silent occupation which espouses neither particular ideology nor common identity is not dissimilar to Maurice Blanchot’s idea of the ‘unavowable community,’ first conceived in response to the events in Paris during May 1968. As Blanchot wrote there, May 1968 showed how ‘without project, without conjuration, in the suddenness of a happy meeting, like a feast that breached the admitted and expected social norms, explosive communication could affirm itself (affirm itself beyond the usual forms of affirmation) as the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar.’ This is a form of protest without specific project and one which is premised, simply, on a wish to refuse. ‘When we refuse,’ Blanchot writes, ‘we refuse with a movement that is without contempt, without exaltation, and anonymous, as far as possible, for the power to refuse cannot come from us, not in our name alone, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first to those who cannot speak.’

It is within this critical fabric, I think, that the contemporary resonance of Gholson’s collection perhaps most particularly comes to the fore. This is where it suggests a strange mesh with and solidarity for the current occupations of Wall Street and the City of London and elsewhere, movements which, though not exactly silent, are consolidated more through the sheer fact of their being there – their physical coming together, the fact of their bodies on the street and of their persistence – than any specific rhetoric of demands or courses of action.

This isn’t to say that this is the only focus of Gholson’s collection. There are other stories and other narratives here, self-contained, tangential, which neither blend nor clash with this recurrent focus. And as Gholson has written, the original intention behind the book was ‘for it to be like a walk through a gallery – but a moving gallery, a gallery without walls, a gallery of stories rising from the faces I passed every day on the street.’ As a result, each narrative in the collection has a subtitle which signposts a work of visual art (‘Oil in the Manner of Edward Hopper,’ for example, or ‘An Aquatint Etching in the Manner of Goya’s Caprices’). For all that, though, there is often a curious disconnect between the artistic reference and the narratives which follow and it’s this deceptive disconnect which, for me, strikes the most interesting chord in the collection.

In interview Gholson has commented how his ‘own experience is that the self doesn’t really exist as some rigid, defined thing […] but that it exists only in context, mired in a constant process of creation and interaction with its surroundings.’ By his own admission, Gholson’s vision is influenced by the Buddhist tradition, specifically the ways in which ‘our concepts, expectations, desires, ideas of what life is and how we want it to be, are all blocking us from experiencing what is right there in front of us.’ The point is to find a way to strip back this interference and lay silence to noise. It’s debatable whether this perspective is exclusively or specifically Buddhist (Christian or Sufi mystics, for instance, maintain not dissimilar perspectives) but the most important idea is that, for Gholson, ‘mystery feeds us.’ It does, of course, and in manifold ways, and most frequently in ways that resound against the limits of what has been said or not said. And it’s this quality to Gholson’s writing that makes me most want to return to this collection and pick it up and read it all over again.

One last point: I don’t know if these are, strictly speaking, prose poems. There is such an insistent, if often thwarted, pull towards narrative throughout the collection that the simple term ‘story’ – or, at a push, maybe even ‘sketch’ – seemed to me more properly fitting. As I say, I don’t know. I like dictionaries as much as anyone but I also like walking the cracks. And perhaps none of this classification business matters much with a work such as this and to get hung up on classifications is to miss the very specific sightlines Gholson’s collection quietly lays open for inspection.

A crow lands on an ash tree and barks. It’s not clear whether his aim is to encourage or deter. It’s not really clear what he’s doing there. But a world opens up and, anyway, as Gholson’s collection concludes, ‘every work of art is about some kind of love.’

Nikolai Duffy’s first chapbook, the little shed of various lamps, was published by The Red Ceilings Press in 2011. His poems, reviews and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Blackbox Manifold, Ink Sweat & Tears, Jacket, Mosaic, Shearsman, and Stride. He is the founding editor of Like This Press (www.likethispress.co.uk). He teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.

dwelling
Richard Makin
Reality Street, Papberback, 672 pages,
978-1-874400-53-0, £17.50

Karina Jakubowicz

Context is everything when it comes to reading Richard Makin’s dwelling. To do as I did and approach the text with no knowledge of its background will almost certainly result in hours of tedium peppered with bewilderment. The book as an object is inoffensive enough, being the size of a solid doorstep and suggesting to the enthusiastic reader that it will last them comfortably through the next two months. However, before bending back the front cover it is useful to know that dwelling is a piece of non-generic prose, published by Reality Street as a part of their ongoing promotion of experimental writing. It follows that you must be ready to indulge in this experiment and actively work with it, a process which begins with the opening lines:

Exit one London. Wandering into the root of to dwell. I will not provoke. I will not provide. Let us through. The first big test is to dig a ditch. In guerrilla warfare it’s said you use your strengths as weaknesses.

Do not, as I did, spend the next fifty pages waiting for a plot to emerge and characters to be sustained. Makin continues in this fragmentary and challenging manner for six-hundred and seventy pages, stopping for chapter breaks but nothing else. It is not that his writing is bad (a glance at the quote above should show that this is not the case) only that there is so much of it. At first I considered the meaning of every line and tried to uncover the connecting threads between each one, but after twenty pages or so I entered into a passive, semi-hypnotic state and had to take a nap. Richard Makin’s writing would perhaps be easier to accept if he didn’t seem so self-conscious about his style. He seems to acknowledge that his work isn’t entirely reader-friendly, going as far as to occasionally coax you onwards. At one point he promises, ‘If you can make it beyond this chapter things start to get a lot easier on the eye,’ and after being buoyed up by this statement you race forward, ploughing through one chapter and into the next, only to find that he lied.

I came to realise that dwelling is like a dictionary or encyclopaedia, being enlightening in small doses but punishing when read from start to finish. Context is again useful for understanding why this might be. The text was originally produced electronically by Great Works, being published as it was written, and serialized over a period of two years. Knowing this, it is possible to argue that the book was never meant to be read as a singular whole, but in sections over a very long period. I cannot help thinking that the original dwelling must have been a less intimidating text, as the readers would have had no notion of its length, not knowing exactly when it would end. The online version must have also had a less definite and more organic feel, having been written as the reader moved through it and easily accessible at any moment in a busy day. The paperback prescribes a different reading experience, being too heavy to carry around and read spontaneously, it requires designated timeslots in comfortable armchairs or quiet libraries. It is a shame that a text which is filled with images of movement and activity must be read in situ, and often away from the chaotic world that inspired it.

As the title of the book suggests, dwelling is a meditation on the activity of habitation. This includes the way we inhabit and practice being, and those nests we create out of custom, culture and instinct. Makin explores those dwellings generated in time, place, language, myth, tradition, body and text, and draws them out in all their complexity. His rendering of different landscapes and environments is consistently vibrant and original, combining candid portraits with personal musings and abstract diversions. His writing is interwoven with allusions to the work of previous authors and literary movements, as well as to the grammatical particulars of language and traditional narrative tropes. This creates a narrative which is seemingly self aware, one which acknowledges (and is thus composed of) its debt to linguistics and literary tradition. Take, for example, the following extract:

An elegy in a dusty boneyard, with solitary beast. I say break it for me. I break speech for you. It is a master-slave relationship: the men in question. She comes with dog (the third person).

Makin’s reference to Thomas Gray’s canonical elegy is typical of the way he both emphasises and deconstructs established methods and trends. The same goes for language; he doesn’t obliterate the components of speech in his effort to ‘break’ it, instead he rearranges the fragments in a way that questions their meaning and use. In this sense dwelling is an exploration of literary representation, providing insight into textual convention while dismissing it in the same move. It is Makin’s playfulness with language and narrative that make this book worthwhile, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to unsettle their literary preconceptions.

I

to the corporeal so then beginning

scenes: QC, defending,

possibilities of the trial

be everything clear

then splice security

from the depths to the known sign.

Trickled through to critical mass,

a staid life,

fortunes courted then daily.

Quit school for a bruise tip harrow

low, dead or going.

II

Climate wane, not worthy

repetition, don’t like

but then coupled to your hide.

Grown to use to feel to desperate

or alone by the spare and the charm

dust of a folk lyric. What a country

and what a country.

Stop ears with the wedges or

endeavour or wadges or scrap book.

You and impressed on with the walls

and ways in hard runnings, the heart

is idle contagious and near stable –

all the other towns are hung collective

not a penny in the pocket not a trembling

hand but out –

all is not well then exterior hurt

then there’s the guidance

systems Jehovah gave

shreds of devotion

buried deep beneath the

red still earth

fixed aspect of time

kow-towed to rest

bed and wake Jacob, they are knocking heads too.

To gather be sure in response

or repose. Time: that there’s

simply nothing for it

we’ll simply out endure.

III

Interesting size, slight foxing

we’ll channel the blood to what

then that’ll be a .

Far side

on elective then

it always looks grim.

sit tight and

so, here you are! Coming

country stomped and pleasure-trip refreshed

long johns trailing the streets

like hell you’ll stand for this.

Alicia Rix

Colm Tóibín’s elegiac group of stories treats some autobiographical themes: being Irish, being gay, reading Henry James. Great novelists—including James himself—have been felled by the ‘terrible economy’ of the short story, though collections by the same author tend to be more generous, or perhaps more novelistic; allowing leitmotifs to develop and the stories to acquire an internal resonance.

Such is the case with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: musical and about music, or Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, in which disparate voices congregate around the brittle comedy of dysfunctional relationships and are marked by patterns of release, escape, flight.

Throughout Tóibín’s collection it is the titular word ‘empty’ and its synonyms that recur, as do backgrounds shorn of detail, particularly austere sea-scapes: ‘The horizon is whiteness, blankness; there are hardly any houses’, intones the narrator of the eponymous ‘The Empty Family’, a gently lyrical, occasionally morose commentary on the inability to go home again. Emptiness informs the names of the tales themselves: ‘One Minus One’, ‘The Colour of Shadows’, ‘Silence’. And it is a pregnant and cohesive emptiness.

Tóibín’s prose lacks the brilliant, punchy economy of a writer like Moore, but here the truncated quality of the stories feels deliberate, and the disjunctive switches between third and first-person narrators, between historical characters like the Irish playwright Lady Gregory and anonymous, meditative I-monologues, do not prevent our identification of the stories and their voices – at once detached and introspective – as members of the same ‘family’.

The familial itself is a persistent idea, underpinning the retrospective glances at love affairs, the sense of generational change accompanying the deaths of relatives, and the loneliness of travelling away from, or returning home. Tóibín’s characters experience solitude in groups: amongst crowds at concerts, restaurants, film sets, and orgies. Emptiness is a spectrum, the author suggests, and so its victims respond to it in different ways. The banished socialist daughter of ‘The New Spain’ returns to Barcelona after the Franco regime to find her family hostile and embarrassed and her hometown changed and tourist-ridden, and defiantly joins the crowd at a carnival. In ‘The Colour of Shadows’ the narrator’s aunt, his only guardian growing up, dies in an old people’s home after extracting a promise that he will never see his estranged mother.

Individual predicaments exhibit family resemblances, but there is little uniformity of tone. The easy, pleasure-seeking, yet ultimately ephemeral confidence of the narrator picking up men in ‘Barcelona, 1975’, contrasts with a stilted consciousness of surveillance in ‘The Street’, which traces the carefully developing intimacy between two Pakistani men in a ‘dark and frightening’ version of the city; whose employment selling mobile phones in the immigrant quarter gestures at an environment in which communication is heavily monitored. Likewise, the tacit suffering of Lady Gregory, who casually relates her affair to Henry James at a dinner party disguised as a tip of possible use for a story, (‘Silence’) seems very different from the urgent need to publish a secret relationship that we find in ‘The Pearl Fishers’, a bitchily funny recounting of clandestine encounters at a Catholic school. Over dinner with a couple of school friends, the narrator looks back to their adolescence, and to his covert relationship with Donnacha, the husband of the pair, now the blandly married adjunct of Gráinne, a sententious journalist. Gráinne has summoned him to let him know of her determination to expose a different ‘truth’: her seduction by a priest at the school. Her resolution to ‘tell the story of my life’, beginning with a single incident – a school trip to the opera –  overrides, but also intersects with, the narrator’s own private memoir.

In such ways, Tóibín’s stories question to what extent any story owes its origin, or bears ‘relation’ to, another. The series of exchanges by which Lady Gregory’s anecdotal ‘tip’ for the famous novelist is inscribed and later plucked from James’s notebooks to become a cue for Tóibín himself, deftly illustrates how one person’s life-story can touch, inform, or even hijack another’s. Tóibín’s Lady Gregory, who has a way of ‘let[ting] [people] know, carefully, tactfully, […] that she was someone on whom nothing was lost’, consciously recalls James’s advice to the ‘novice’ writer in ‘The Art of Fiction’: ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’ In the same essay James asks: ‘What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end?’, pointing out that  ‘[e]xperience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads.’ The Empty Family displays a nuanced understanding of such anxiety of relation.

Iain Britton

be like this – be transitory

a gateway obstacle

to the next apartment

where a sigh escapes in a roll-your-own breath

where a stool takes the sudden shift of my weight

and a late-night monologue

loads

a listener’s request

to practise walking

down a long tunnel

gutted by ancestral burnings

<>

I offer my version

of events as they happen

you aren’t sure about the rain

its coldness

the integers         parenthesised

on your arms               or the inked letters

of a name

tattooed in sunsets

recapitulation is all talk / dredge work / more talk

you’re into the habit of quickly

shutting doors

<>

but who’ll step up         make

altar-suggestions

of stained-glass jabberings reflected on the mount

who’ll request a right

to what I’ve hung drawn and arranged

in every room

<>

a water-colour shoves a church

through my window / monuments

crumble into drunks
xxxxxxxmixed gender
xxxxxxxxxxxxangels in shabby clothes

a crowd xxxxxhacks at the air to get a look in
they knock at places with rooms to let

you pick up another man’s junk

we are witnesses to things as they happen

we make apes of ourselves

leave slag heaps for neighbours
turn our backs on backs

we avoid confrontations

zeroing-in

on the mischievous cackle of a river

______

Iain Britton’s upcoming collection, Druidic Approaches, can be previewed here. It will be published by Lapwing Publications.

Image Copyright: Foomandoonian