George Szirtes ‘The Burning of the Books and Other poems’

 

Szirtes weighs the power of language, culture and human tenderness to confront wrenching symbols of terror. Books are no safeguard. The artistic impulse to draw things together is flawed, vulnerable and distorting. We see Nazi book burnings, and visit characters from literature and history blinded by their love of books to the malice of people around them.

 

             ‘…a wholesale

Burning of the books, here on this very street

Where they are piled high…’ (from Postscriptum)

 

 

In the aesthetically pleasing photographs of Eugene Atget, in the horrifying record Nazi atrocities of the Penig fragments, in the iconic film stars of today, reality is constructed but feelings are invisible. We remain ‘unable to feel but think, think and see…’ (from ‘Shining Jack’.

 

In the middle sequences, Szirtes draws us toward refreshing natural cycles of morning, night, dawn and thaw, to the awakening of the mind after the Dark Ages. We encounter the formal Canzones, the Troubadours, Renaissance architecture, the painter’s pigments and the writer’s phonemes of a pure language ( The Birds). Yet such raw forms are confounded by human touch. In the sequence ‘Northern Air: A Hungarian Nova Zembla’ we return to the flawed beginnings of English prose when fictitious author, Sir John Mandeville, composed fantastic tales, passing them off as truth.

 

Gazing with the poet through doorways and windows without the mediation of art, however, and we see an unrelieved world of pain. Prisoners are roped together, refugees cower in ditches and mechanical progress characterised by ‘decapitations and defenestrations’.

 

As Szirtes recognises the impossibility of his own elegiac project, he abandons scholarly tools deadened meanings and probes with awkward questions the politics and social order which gives language life. Readers familiar with Julia Kristeva’s ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ [1974], will recognise these flawed channels of communication where fresh verse forms and vistas invite but refuse interpretation ( ‘In the Face of History: In Time of War’)

 

 

Only in the later sequences do we learn, ‘Since it is love I want to write’ (from White Noise). The view beyond the window is gentle, ‘You look through the window and feel’ (from Canzone: In memoriam WSU). The sequences are characterised by tenderness, ‘voices...awaken. comfort, endear’ ( from ‘Naming), where the poet can name a lover, ‘ So you, my love, know no more than I do’ (from Naming ). And God is rumoured; ‘The eye of God will sort man out from the beast.(from Visitation: The Burning Mothers’)

 

From the Renaissance to the innovations in contemporary arts, the collection ends where the consumerist dream has died, in ‘Woolworths’, a dead shop, killed off by the system it helped to create. Language sells end-of-line commodities ‘Wrapping paper, a score/ of remnant CDs’. While Sirztes writes that he has fears about history ‘its grand public face, its tyrant sneer,’ we might also add that ‘The Burning of the Books’ shows how it is language we need to fear, too. And the ends it is made to serve.

 

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Don Paterson ‘Rain’

Paterson won the Forward prize in 2009 with ‘Rain’ which contains the sequence ‘Phantom’, in memory of the poet Michael Donaghy.

Like much of Paterson’s work, these poems are unsettling and direct. Many exlore elemental themes, personal growth and parenthood. In ‘Rain at Sea’ for example, ‘the whole sea fixed me in its stare’, and the moon ‘lays down its path into the self’ (‘Parallax’). Several poems express anxieties for the wellbeing of a child, as in ‘The Swing’ and ‘The Story of the Blue Flower’. In ‘Correctives’ and ‘The Circle’, he watches his teenage son, who sustained a birth trauma, settling his shaking hand with one touch, ‘one hand’s kindness to the other’.

In a different mood, the erotic love elegy ‘Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze’, a poem that won the Forward best single poem award last year, Paterson sets up his online adoration of Natalie and TBA with her minimal experimental electronic music from Tbilisi, Georgia. While the music maintains an overwhelming dark presence, the vocals are beautifully emotionless. ‘I doubt we will ever meet’ says Paterson as he contemplates her ‘with a reconditioned laptop bought with a small grant/ from the local arts cooperative…’ He could make Natalie complete by giving her the best technical gear, while relishing the techno language of, ‘the zero-latency heaven of the 32-bit floating point environment with no buffer-glitch or freeze or dropout lag.’

 

 

In the calmer, ‘Renku: My last Thirty-Five Deaths’, surfaces hint at hidden patterns: moonlight on blossom suggest the human face; zips carry the weight of the earth. Relationships float in and out. In In Unfold ‘ The bathysphere,  the poet become free when he recounts how he bought an old broken bathysphere. As a rich metaphor for the interplay between knowledge and imagination, the bathysphere shows a playful distraction providing a flawed but godlike view of creation.  

 

Paterson sets human longing for warmth against an impersonal universe with ‘The Day’. In ten sestets under a controlling rhyme and rhythm, he hints at patterns in language and time. Infinity touches the here-and-now.  Relationships reach beyond the physical. Terms like ‘lucky’, ‘odds’, ‘meant’ and ‘miracle’, point to a force behind human ingenuity;

 

‘They stare down at their own five-fingered hands

And the rings that look like nothing on that earth.’

 

 Paterson’s ‘daft ceremonies’ react to Yeats’s question from ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, ‘How but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?’

 

The seven part elegy, ‘’Phantom’ we see Paterson grieving for his friend and turns to unsettling issues about the parameters of art and imagination. In the fourth section, Michael Donagthy himself speaks about the self and soul before enlisting humour and kindness.  The poem ends in a fruitful tension between the human desire to celebrate Donaghy’s artistry, and the quest for honest interpretation of his well-crafted verse.

 

In the title poem, Paterson compares the perfection of rain with blundering human intervention. ‘Rain’ is an apt final piece as Paterson leaves us clearer in our search for some imperishable bliss.

 

 

Michael McKimm, born in1983, is a poet from Northern Ireland. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 from The Society of Authors. Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009) is debut collection of poetry.

Readers who cherish Northern Irish landscape poetry and want to see it extended, will find in Michael McKimm a source of great promise. His vision derives from the landscape, the uneasy history of human presence and a world beyond Ireland in Europe and North America with poems such as ‘The History’, ‘The Cycling Geologist’ ‘The Lake Effect’ and ‘The Granite State’.

The title is significant. Stillness pervades this collection; still moments listening to the call of creature in the night, memories that ‘still roar beyond the boundaries’ (‘Cemetary’) the stillness of water, the becalmed relationships which ended his parents’ letter writing. Particularly impressive in scope are the sequence poems such as ‘Lammas Lands’ a poetic account of the watercourse through Hackney Marsh ‘from the damp earth they’ve pulled up their thoughts…’

The collection includes ‘Fledgling’, contrasting the ‘sharp blasts’ of passing freight trains with an imagined lapwing the poet brings to accompany sleep. The imaginary lapwing and other birds set the tone for the collection as he examines the cost to the countryside of human progress. McKimm portrays creatures at the limit of human contact, representing a world almost lost. Foxes bait us from our dreams in ‘Resurrection’ and we confront ‘the smouldering unrest’ of our lives in ‘The Burial’. McKimm skilfully creates a sense of scale, juxtaposing the powerful with the powerless, the gun with the ewe, ( ‘Aran’) the fully-binoculared private club members and the stonechat (‘Green Man’), ‘the heat that’s found in stonewall and the pulse of years’ (The Old Coach House, Cark). In ‘Squam Lake’, the ululation at night of a creature beyond the balcony beckons like a cry to the lost.  

Nature’s benevolence is ‘All so simple’ (from At Last). Water provides almost miraculous cures in ‘Fresh Water Cure’; ‘Lower Bann and Foyle to clear the lungs,/ the shaken trickles from Lough Neagh to ease the blood’. Water is crafted in different ways from draining Hackney to the skilful barman skimming the head from a pint of Guinness in ‘Pub Crawl’.

As with other Northern Irish poets, ‘a narrative of craftsmanship’ is never far away. We admire the painter, the collector of birds eggs, the song thrush as it smashes shells for food in ‘Still Life with five nests’. Yet in ‘Fashion Show’ when the model represents merciless commercialism, she most resembles a bird in flight; ‘she could almost take flight…a Lewes bird of paradise.’ Another symbol forced to serve a dark purpose in the landscape is the Martello Tower. Although redolent with the associations of James Joyce, the tower also represents an oppressive colonial past. They were built throughout the British Empire as symbols of domination.

The collection ends with ‘Reprieve’ where nothing has changed in a thousand years. ‘We alter daily, and find our histories malleable’.

 

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‘History is the patterns we make;’.

 

The foreign vision– ‘The Granite State’ p 55, as he contemplates the destructive forces in Nature:

‘…the land slipped one afternoon and crushed

the Willey family without a moment’s notice –

 

 ‘ he sees in the granite the kindred thing’.

The Lake Effect’ p46-47 Graeme and Amor transatlantic memories

Human memories ‘ memories are black rocks beneath bare feet’ from ‘The Seagull’p 43

 

In ‘ The Burial’, the poet explores an uneasy need of someone to return to his pay natale. Alerted to the need to return by a bereavement, he stands in the dark, among the sounds of the rustling leaves.\then the smouldering unrest of the life he’d made’

‘History is the patterns we make’ in ‘ Moose’, a poem reminscent of William Stafford’s…..Incident on the Wilson picket Road.

 

:

snatches of smiles, long-forgotten tastes, half-baked

murmurs at the back of the mind’

(from The Moose)

‘Its all so simple’ (from At Last) as the house is decorated with flowers from the roadside.

 

‘…the land slipped one afternoon and crushed

the Willey family without a moment’s notice – ‘ (from The Granite State)

 

‘He sees in the granite the kindred thing.’ (from The Granite State)

 

‘We’ll spend the night

There, wind shuddering the panes, curled up tight

With books, working letters into puzzles

For the new words; each consonant, each vowel.’

(from ‘An Invitation’)

.

 

 

 

 

 His message enlists the elemental to purify and begin afresh.

no/nothing, breath and death, dream, koto, book, Scots Maw? Silent songs,   blank looks, nought plus one and nothing, born mandie god, walls, ceilings, puppeteer, mother chiding ‘no more TV’, waiting 80 years, blossom, hydrangea, clouds, crying, lost world fly in a bok, skull thinking of clouds, the wins (ELIOT) ‘what am I thinking? Close doors, tinnitus curre, frost on glass, mask is slipping, mon and life keeping poace, voices ‘ It’s been real, birthday and the void, birdsong, to late, the page left blans,

 

 

 

 

occasion Aphrodite was not with him as he and his hunting dogs tracked a wild boar. Adonis' spear only wounded the mighty boar that turned mad with pain and gored Adonis with his tusks. Aphrodite heard his cries and fled to him. The dark blood flowed down his skin and his eyes grew heavy. She kissed him as he died. The crimson anemone, a wind flower, sprang up where his blood had dropped. She wept for him as did all the Muses.

 

The Renka allows movement between time and space, theme, dream and questions. All discourse types are here- statements, interrogatives, questions, topic shadowing as language approaches and departs. We sense

and to whom the Forward prize for best single poem is dedicated. That award was won this year by Robin Robertson for At Roane Head, a haunting poem about four children who are half-human, half-seal: ‘All born blind, they say, / slack-jawed and simple, web-footed, / rickety as sticks. Beautiful faces, I'm told, / though blank as air.’#

These ten sestets, under Paterson’s technical control, show language at its most ceremonious and articulate

It's ‘just knee-weakeningly good’, said Harsent. ‘With its echoes of Synge and its disturbing images [it] unsettles and enchants,’ added Hart. ‘It is unforgettable.’

The wins mean that Paterson and Robertson have now each won three Forward prizes: Paterson for Rain, for best first collection in 1993 with Nil Nil and last year for best single poem with Love Poem For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze (which is included in Rain); Robertson for his first collection A Painted Field and for Swithering in 2006. Sean O'Brien became the first poet to win all three prizes in 2007.

Wednesday evening's awards ceremony, at Somerset House in London, also saw Emma Jones's The Striped World, inspired by her home country of Australia, named winner of the £5,000 best first collection prize. Hart called her ‘an ambitious and intriguing new voice’ whose poems ‘are both elliptical and visionary – inhabiting a parallel world of strange disjointed images within which we nevertheless find echoes of familiar experience’

no/nothing, breath and death, dream, koto, book, Scots Maw? Silent songs,   blank looks, nought plus one and nothing, born mandie god, walls, ceilings, puppeteer, mother chiding ‘no more TV’, waiting 80 years, blossom, hydrangea, clouds, crying, lost world fly in a bok, skull thinking of clouds, the wins (ELIOT) ‘what am I thinking? Close doors, tinnitus curre, frost on glass, mask is slipping, mon and life keeping poace, voices ‘ It’s been real, birthday and the void, birdsong, to late, the page left blans,

 

We see him as a father, setting up swings, and the human imagination, ‘each self-reflecting mind is in this manner destined to forget its element.’ In ‘The Story of the Blue Flower’, the

Reviewed by Fiona Sampson

The dandified brilliance of Don Paterson's first two collections allowed casual readers mistakenly to see him as a wizard of poetry-lite. Landing Light (2003) confounded such assumptions by bringing that virtuosity to bear on more complex material, such as parenthood and fidelity, to extraordinary effect. Rain, which extends and deepens this project, is also a lament for Paterson's comrade-in-arms, the poet Michael Donaghy, who died in 2004.

Far from any Shakespearean notion of gentleness, Paterson's Rain is grainy as a black-and-white movie: ‘I love all films that start with rain’. In the title poem, water cleanses a human state of something like Original Grief: ‘all was washed clean in the flood /we rose up from the falling waters /the fallen rain's own sons and daughters’. But the book's centre of gravity is the extraordinary seven-part ‘Phantom’.

In this chiaroscuro meditation on presence and absence, ‘The night's surveillance’ denotes our accompaniment by grief, fer, and regret. Death undoes not only the self but the meaning that self brought to things: ‘it reached into the room/ switched off the mirrors in their frames/ and undeveloped your photographs’.

‘Michael Donaghy the poet’ speaks to – and through – the grieving narrator. Like Dante's Virgil, he has become our expert guide to the nature of death, which is to say of life. In an astonishingly Hughesian foundation myth, ‘[Matter] made a self

‘[Matter] made a self to look at death,/ but then within the self it saw its death;/ and so it made a soul to look at self,/ but then within the soul it saw its death;/ and so it made a god to look at soul’.

What stops that sounding like Ted Hughes is Paterson's characteristic iambic metre, which evokes the authority of tradition. But this is not traditional elegy, with its comforting closure. Paterson shines the ‘black sun’ of ‘the void’ on the living too: ‘We come from nothing and return to it./ It lends us out to time’. This troubled, troubling sequence is a contemporary, secular equivalent of Hopkins's ‘Terrible Sonnets’; demanding not intellectually, but emotionally.

The ghost of Donaghy treads more lightly elsewhere, especially through a cluster of poems ‘after’ (one can never be quite sure with Paterson) Desnos, Cavafy, Li Po, Vallejo, Quasimodo and Robert Garioch. These ‘versions’ reveal a poetry exploring and extending its capacities in the face of what a more glib writer might have called the inexpressible.

Along with Paterson's earlier versions of Rilke, they haunt the diction of poems such as ‘The Error’. Which other contemporary would risk borrowing Eliot's ‘eye-beam’? – where paradox, associated with the Metaphysical poets, is transformed by a highly contemporary sensibility into images of opposition and reflection. That contemporaneity is showcased by the Forward Prize-winning ‘Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze’, a joyous masterclass in rhyme and electro-geekery. For there's plenty of living in this subtly interrelated book, too. ‘The Handspring’, with its ‘world swung up on your fingertips’, is as deft as the cartwheel it captures in four lines. ‘The shudder in my son's left hand/ he cures with one touch from his right’ represents not only ‘all /(thank god) his body can recall’ of momentary oxygen-starvation, but a glancing tribute to friendship, ‘the one hand's kindness to the other’. It's hard to imagine a more tender leave-taking than ‘The Swing’.

With their sense of an individual consciousness pressing freshly on the reader, these poems gleam with authenticity. Rain is a truly important book, not only in the development of this must-read poet, but because it engages with the rough and tumble of life in a way we recognise as true. Read it now, before it becomes famous.

 

Michael McKimm (born 1983) is a poet from Northern Ireland. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 from The Society of Authors. His debut collection of poetry is Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009).

McKimm was born in Belfast but lived from the age of seven on the north coast of County Antrim, near the Giant's Causeway and the town of Bushmills. He attended Dunseverick Primary School and Coleraine Academical Institution, in Coleraine, County Londonderry, before moving to England to study English Literature and Creative Writing at Warwick University. He now lives in London.

McKimm received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2007, awarded to the best poets in the UK under the age of 30. His poetry has appeared in many journals in the UK, including Horizon Review, Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review and The Warwick Review. His work is included in The Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (edited by Matthew Sweeney) and also in Dossier Journal (New York) in a collaborative project with his brother Alastair McKimm.

Retrieved from ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_McKimm‘