|
|
Some books you have to read right off for work so I read
them and know what they are, maybe there is something there, I'm not really interested. Some books come in, you know, and get
shelved, a year or two later you don't know how they got there or what they
were for. They are maybe close to the list of what you should read only that
list does seem to expand exponentially. But you can outlive the apparent urgency,
cut off what turned out to be side shoots etc, and dump a good deal. I'm
thinking functional insulation, non-remarkable decor, and maybe unforeseen
resale for someone at a car boot. Then there are the books you see and go
into right away knowing that you could read them for wit alone: only they are
about what is of most interest, in the proper sense, and you can't afford to
set them aside, which is not to say that you can take them in all once.
In writing poetry I would want to have a very few books with me for special
reference, if you see what I mean, certainly among them would be Halsey's Marginalien, concentrated and forensic wit, compression music
and lights coming on as you read: the thing itself. I have had the book here
at home for some time and each time I pick it up and look in I find something
I hadn't really considered I'd need, but there it is, which is to say that
the book imagines ways ahead in poetry quite unforeseen. It is pure
intelligence of various means of departure, refined and sharpened up, exactly
located, appropriately geared, and cutting right into ore as we dream. Here
is a normally secret and invisible antiquarian language spy, print-mining
insect, lizard watcher and dovetailed pistachio piss taker, book dealer and
forger, editor and printer's devil, emblem inventor, chiastic satirist,
light-fingered anti-lyricist, lingering among the keywords and search
engines. It is maybe the last real sense we'll get about how we got to the
late last days of New Labour and it is our poetry, in English, not at all
what is usually packaged and put out around here.
History is being done for us
if you will, just as seeing
bridges
bombed is a kind
of reality. If, if you will,
you, if you
will, just as history
is us being
done for, will.
This is from 'Song-Cycle 1991' a beautiful mobilization of (then and now)
current public language and the assumptions therein, turned into a music of
ghastly knowingness, with real compassion and sadness, a terrific poem.
Off the wall
to wall wall
and beyond
anybody's brief
song------universally
redeemed or
virtually
ready,
knowing one state's lot
is another
lot's state, less free-
fall grace
than mutual pre-
ferment,
where reason resigns,
where reason
carries on.
The re-use of stock phrases and the quick use of words within words, of
reversals and line breaks (like the discovery of 'ferment' in 'preferment',
the witty insertion of 'wall-to-wall' in 'off the wall') all this would be
fun anywhere, but where else is it put to such use? Halsey is a great satirist,
probably the best we have, check out 'Alien Proforma' and 'Greenhouse
Effects: A Calendar'. Someone should send it to Margaret Beckett or John
Prescott, but then again. . .
The book gathers up some things you might wish you'd got at the time when
they were first released: I'm thinking of the wonderful 'Robin Hood Book',
'Dante's Barbershop', and 'The Art of Memory in Hay on Wye'. There is a CD
included of 'Memory Screen', of which the text itself comments 'an impossible
book' and who am I to argue? Colour graphics of assembled graffiti text and
image with commentary shading into aphorism that takes Halsey's visual work
into another dimension, well presented here to display on my little Mac, or
any PC, rich colour and texture making the most of the media; I must try it
projected on a really big screen. The book itself is the thing though, the
poems and sequences more inventive and playful, sharper and more brilliant
than anything you'll find anywhere, think about it, think about the backlist
of UK poetry awards. They just don't get it. Alan Halsey is I believe alive
and well, living in Sheffield, and was not even on the short list for the
so-called T.S. Eliot prize. I can hear a green woodpecker calling as I write
this, a bird well adapted to exploit long established and mixed suburban
relic woodland: unusually vivid green and red with a call like mocking
laughter going away.
©
Tony Lopez, 2006
|