|
|
This title is presumably a pun. Escafeld is an old name
for Sheffield, but Hangings in the sense of tapestries, or just hanging
around? Execution is a theme of the book since the main character was Mary
Queen od Scots, who was of course beheaded. One of the central conceits of
the book is that Mary spent her time of confinement in needlework: producing
tapestries, textiles, texts, letters. The book proclaims itself to be a book
about a place, Sheffield, and so it needs to hang together in other senses as
well. But it doesn't hang like a tapestry, it is not tightly woven, the
picture it textures is a diffuse and many-angled one. Poem sequences about
place have a long history, even within the field of modernism, and perhaps it
is to this sequence's credit that it does not fit particularly into that
tradition. The recent book it reminds me of is in fact one in a more mainstream
(inevitable pun) tradition: Alice Oswald's Dart, which likewise uses voices culled from interviews and has a mimetic
relation to its subject.
The ruined walls of Sheffield Manor of the cover photograph are taken up in
the first section, 'The City of Eternal Construction'. These poems remind us
that - unlike many of the hub cities of the industrial revolution - Sheffield
had a past, is built upon ruins and tunnels and ghosts (although eternal
might be pushing it, I always thought Rome was hubristic in calling itself
the Eternal City). In these poems the language is clear, colloquial,
narrative, almost guide-book. Perhaps there is some mockery here: one danger
of 'place poems' is of pomposity and over-seriousness; what after all makes
the place that is the subject of the poem unique? How to say this without
using the language of the tour-guide or the 'City of Contrasts' tone of the
civic documentary (as in the pre-credits sequence to The Full Monty)?.
For Monk the uniqueness of Sheffield is its history. The second section is
'Mary Queen of Scots'. The first part of this, 'Unsent Letters', is even more
relaxed, a series of post-historical letters composed by an imaginary Queen
of Scots to Queen Elizabeth in prose, cheerfully anachronistic, as if Mary
were still ghosting in the ruins of Sheffield Manor taking on the language
and concerns of a contemporary urban Sheffield, still pleading for release
until in her last letter she comes to 'the inconsolable scratch of quill at
the final loop of my signature'. Then follows 'She Kept Birds', for me the
least successful section of the book. In a series of lists the Latin name for
a bird is followed by its dialect names. Naturally, these names are often
curious and euphonic but this seems uncreated as a poem, even lazy. Lists
like this depend on the work of Victorian naturalist-scholars such as
Swainson, who spent their lives collecting these items of folk-speech. Like
much folklore, they were close to oblivion even then, and most of them are
now as ddead as the Latin species-names they follow. Lists like this just
perpetuate the quaintness of dialect speech unhistorically, without adding
anything to what is already available in the lexicons. A different poet (Bob
Cobbing?) might have made more of this.
Then there is 'Marian Hangings', a sequence of short poems. These are great.
I'll quote one in full, 'The Hand and Pruning Book':
'virtue flourishes by wounding'
my gift of love cut-c
lean fruity through.
Not just the radical enjambment, the sound of it, that word fruity that does so much. Monk is a poet concerned with
sound, the book comes with a CD in which the words are sounded at full throat
with Rs rolled and all the French coming out (at times there is a deliberate
indistinction between Sheffield dialect and French, in ma for my etc.) So in 'Mary Through the Looking
Glass', which on the CD is a performance piece, full of shivery echoes and
French samples. Keats on acid.
The last section, 'Shed', is more withdrawn, contemplative even. The writing
is more taut, the poems patterned, textual, closer to tapestry. These (it
states) are poems that were literally written in Monk's garden shed,
continuing with many of the previous themes but in a different register.
There is much on Mary's clothing, fashion, etc. I would have liked this
section more without the claims that the blurb makes on the back cover:
'Without assuming personae Escafeld Hangings offers a psychological mapping of political
imprisonment with its implications for our own time'. I never like to be told
how to read a poem; this claim seems to teeter towards the grandiose. If
there are parallels between the imprisonment of Mary and current
imprisonments, they seem to be pretty tenuous beyond that of the exigencies
of politics, the unjustness of being caught and used as a pawn in a bigger
claim. Mary was no Ang Sang Sui, campaigning for democracy. I think the poem
is intelligent enough to contain this, among its many observations and
reflections. The deliberate use of anachronism and contemporary reference are
enough here.
I think everyone already agrees that imprisonment is a bad experience and
therefore people in prison are unhappy, you don't need to read a poem to
discover this. If the poem 'wanted' to have more implications for our own time,
that should have been included inside the book, not on its sleeve. I found
myself reading to find things that were in the end not there. Or am I missing
something?
A pity when a blurb almost spoils a good book by making larger-than-life
claims.
© Giles Goodland 2005
|