After a virtual silence of approximately 6 years John Ash offers not
one but two new books, albeit within the same covers. In these intervening
years he has transplanted himself and his concerns from New York to
Istanbul, in order, he says:
to escape the children
and the dogs,
and the nice but strange
woman
who stole my doormat’
This ‘explanation’ can be found in one of the poems I keep returning
to, ‘‘Mektup’, a broadcast from Ash’s current outpost of exile and
one I first read in Ian Robinson’s Oasis
magazine a couple of years ago. The form, as the Turkish title suggests,
is that of a letter and may be entirely fictional or autobiographical.
From the uncertain conditional of the opening, ‘If you receive this
letter’ through descriptions of the surroundings the writer currently
occupies to the almost confessional tone that the poem moves towards
it is a concise example of what Ash means when he says in ‘My Poetry’:
I always
thought
it was just my heart
talking about things
I loved and hated,
hated and loved.
His focus moves from a prosaic present and can’t help but take
another look at a past he displays an inveterate fascination with:
But I don’t know
why these places mean so much
to me, or what I am
seeking in the ruins.
Repose of a kind, compiling
a Dictionary of Lost Things…
In fact those last six words could almost be an alternative title
for this collection of his work. This
poem conveys, in its meditations, an irrecoverable sense of loss,
both personal and general, and concludes with a statement that is
as hopeless as it is well meaning:
I send you all
the love that makes no difference at all.
This loss runs through a number of these poems. Sometimes it has
a specific focus, as in ‘Elegy, Replica, Echo’. Elsewhere it is more wide ranging,
as in ‘The Anatolikon’,
a brilliantly sustained piece that finds the narrator in restless
journeying, absorbing and describing dazzling images whilst remaining
somehow unsatisfied:
And still I kept looking for
something that was not there amid
so much that was
This fugitive narrator
cannot answer when asked what he
‘was looking for in the ruins so late in the day’ and the inevitable
conclusion is that the journey or the search is the end in itself
and justifies the relentless pursuit of something lost or elusive.
This sense of irretrievable
loss is at its sharpest and most poignant in, ‘My Life’:
Father, sister, mother, I look at the phone –
black instrument
– and my hand moves to dial
numbers that will connect
something to nothing.
There is so much to
be said that can never be said.
But if his tone is often predominantly elegiac it can equally
be humorous, sometimes combining
both, as in ‘All Purpose Elegy’:
O it was here, but now it is
gone!
It was always
gone or going. It was here,
I am convinced of it,
only a minute
Or
a century ago, and already I miss it.
There are number of poems that
convey an unalloyed pleasure in language, such
as ‘The Plumbers Of
Asia’, a fantasy in which
the said plumbers become migrating birds and ‘lyrical and improvisatory’
composers. He also offers some extended meditations
on beds, nervousness and music, the latter
concluding with another note of loss, the listener expelled from ‘that paradise’, the music being something that ‘cannot be grasped’. It seems that however I try I find myself
drawn back to these images of loss and exile. He does treat the
latter in a lighter, self-referential way in
places, as in ‘Bozuk Para’. Here he comments
on the failure to write
and send home letters which could actually convey any sense of exile
whilst asking, ‘So this is exile, is it?’
He is perhaps at his most playful yet instructive in ‘How To
Use This Book’, a poem which to some extent does set out part of his
poetic purpose, that is, ‘to get you moving’.
It contains some gentle mockery and humour
as he takes the reader aside to offer advice on how to read the text. It obviously connects with ‘My Poetry’ in that this work is not ‘difficult’
or ‘experimental’ but simply offers any reader with an open mind something
Ash has commented on elsewhere:
The function
of poetry isn’t really direct commentary on the state of the
country and
so on, but rather to present an alternative to it – feeling,
fulfilment,
the search of the individual.
In this selection there is certainly plenty of evidence of the latter
but I enjoy the range and richness of language he uses to convey his
concerns, the wit, the celebration, the ‘imaginative geographies’
that he leads the reader through. All of these aspects of his work
single him out as an original voice that deserves to be widely read
and relished.
© Paul Donnelly 2003