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'I must sing you back / from the ordinary world'
writes Keith Jafrate, beginning his epic book-length poem as a love poem,
Orpheus who sings 'to wake Eurydice', 'to lay down my speeches / in the
summmer of your body'. This isn't a narrative retelling of the myth, though
Jafrate uses elements of it: for example there are powerful descriptions of
a contemporary 'hell', a horribly familiar underworld through which the
narrator travels, seeing 'the skulls of cars / ...red ink of cartons washed
to tan / by smog-wash and oil and our faith in acid'or 'scum of reject
lubricant
/ on yard after yard of blue // polythene off-cut stuffed / under crust and
solvent'. This 'poison land' encompasses landfills, where pieces of the world
are 'slung in a bowl of earth', and fields, 'pestless and slack'.
But if Jafrate can describe the sordidness of the world, he can also write
lyrically about its beauty, as in his William Carlos Williams-like paean to
the blackbird, which moves in and out of the poem like a jazz riff. There are
gorgeous images too - 'the poppies lipstick the garden', or 'the rain is a
brush / laid on a cymbal', or 'mittens / of snow on each fold of the
cypresses'. These contrasts point up the extremes of Jafrate's writing, which
can be both harsh and angry or tender and lyrical ('the skin of a baby's face
/ which is neither skin nor face / but white of daisies / and certain kinds /
of silk'). Like the poet W.S.
Graham, Jafrate takes on language so that it becomes almost a character in
the poem. 'Language ah now you have me', wrote Graham, and Jafrate has a
similarly intimate relationship ('I lick the blood of verbs', he writes) so
that by the close of the poem it seems that perhaps it's language, rather
than the figure of Eurydice, to whom he's writing, underlining the primacy of
giving language to things, of putting them into words. To Jafrate, 'the body
without language / [is] weaker than a bird / colder than a bell', and
elsewhere it's as if he resurrects through language: 'sleep body / the poem
loves you', he says, as if by this act of naming and telling and making into
poetry, he can restore something vital.
At its best, this can mean that every detail Jafrate mentions - 'a
woodlouse / a cow / a button' - takes on a sense of the sacred, but
occasionally there seem too many unrelated details, things glimpsed which
therefore have to be put in the poem but which have little imaginative
resonance for the reader, so that the poet himself is guilty of what he
writes of, a state of being 'where language falls like litter'. The most
extreme example of this is a letter, quoted verbatim, from the funder of an
arts event, presumably meant to signify the petty bureaucracy of
administrators crushing the creative spirit of the artist. But it seems out
of place in the poem, and is anyway a fairly mild example of our Kafkaesque
world: Jafrate should compare notes with an asylum seeker.
This aside, Songs for Eurydice is a wonderfully sustained piece of writing,
linking back to Anglo Saxon poetry, especially in sections like this chant,
beginning 'how the moon is a face and the fist is a world / how the blade is
a world and the world is lead / how the world is glass and the eye is a
globe' and so on - it's difficult to halt the flow of the quote. There's also
the use of compound words like 'lightdance birdbreast', the muscular language
with its strong rhythms, and the aurality of the poem, which makes you long
to hear it performed. Beautifully and unusually produced by Stride, in a neat
square format, this is a book that more than fulfils what Jafrate calls our
'duty': 'to inhabit all of English'.
© Elizabeth Burns 2004
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