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One of the many excitements of Martin
Corless-Smith's recent books - Nota (2003) and now Swallows - is
that neither bears more than passing resemblance to our accustomed
expectation of a poetry collection. A cursory glance at Swallows might
suggest it is a kind of chrestomathy, its many quotations gathered from
diverse sources, mostly but not exclusively concerned with the natural
history of the swallow. The first 12 pages in fact consist only of
quotations. Later, when the reader might feel he has safely arrived among
poems which are the 'real' or 'original' content of the book he will find
further quotations interjected as illustrations, asides or peremptory
interruptions between lines or stanzas. He will in any case wonder to what
extent he is offered poems by Martin Corless-Smith: after the initial
miscellany he will have read fragments 'From Papyri' and aphorisms attributed
to Pseudo-Epiphanius, and later he will find the fragmentary works of William
Williamson, written on the walls of his house during World War II. And,
besides, some of the poems appear to be lists, notes, diary entries or
cancelled drafts. There is throughout a pervasive suggestion of poems as yet
unwritten (perhaps poems impossible to write) which exist (but crucially do
not exist) outside the pages of the book.
And it is a book which asks attention to its every aspect, even to so slight
an item as the biographical note: it seems that the author is himself a
swallow, 'a native of Worcestershire, England, to which he returns each
summer'. During his migration he 'lives and teaches in Boise, Idaho'. A
swallow lives between homes, has either two homes or in consequence none; he
dwells between migrations in a house not his and in Corless-Smith's book the
house belongs to William Williamson. Such a migratory existence has
underwritten all Corless-Smith's work and it is noteworthy that his life in
America has never provided his writing's locus but has allowed a perspective
through which he views or rather recreates his homeland. To a present-day
inhabitant of England this homeland bears a curious relation to the place of
that name, for Corless-Smith is consciously an exile in time as well as
place: the lenses in his perspective-glass were made by Walton, Clare,
Burton, Browne and White of Selborne. Among his achievements is the fact that
such sources have not led him into fusty antiquarianism. There is in his work
no easy acceptance of sentimentality and nostalgia: such feelings are often
present but subtly confronted, used to unexpected ends, refused, re-used,
again refused and so on in a constant quarrel. Many of his poems have been
multi-voiced, distanced by personae and treated with critical procedures as
if they were verses found in an undated archive, the work of an unidentified
maker and of questionable value. They are marked by disjunctive and
disruptive devices which appear less a late modernist impulse than an innate distrust
of human schemata. In Swallows the sections 'A Pastoral Interlude' and 'Field
Notes' are printed on unnumbered pages inserted within the standard
pagination, as if they possibly do not belong in the book; the opening
sequence, 'Kunstkammer', evolves into a disorderly inventory of natural
phenomena and manmade objects, suggesting that our will to order merely
obfuscates the actual but ungraspable relations among things found and made
-
That
which I have created here
as
opposed (in fact) to that which is natural (remains natural)
Occupying an intermediate position
it
begins to acquire a soul
having
the words to describe itself
at this
moment, not sufficiently distanced
from
that which makes also myself
absorbing and reflecting recurrently
In such a passage we see Corless-Smith's concern with the place of 'self' in
an alienated and exilic world, impressions of identity and continuity upheld
by desire but in Nota and Swallows increasingly tested by a
scepticism which has one of its sources in Greek philosophy. 'Because we
remember we believe we endure,' writes Pseudo-Epiphanius, and: 'Soul is that
name which I give to all that beneath I am É' 'Soul' in this understanding
might unfashionably fulfill the migrant's quest for lost identity. Burton is
quoted: 'The Soul is alien to the body, a nightingale to the air, a swallow
in an house' - and yet the section of Swallows
entitled 'Soul' is subtitled 'House' and the substratum posited by William
Williamson rapidly erodes -
Soul is
the idea that man exists in a 'profound' sense
beneath
the surface, in existence I gouge
depth
is an illusion a metaphoralized desire
for
individual presence perhaps understanding
the
impersonality of language but nonetheless
if soul
exists anywhere it is during language
- to the point that he concludes the wall he writes on 'is my soul / This
wall is W... W........n [illegible autograph]'.
Inevitably the migrant's homeward gaze will focus on specific beloved places,
and there are many place-names in Corless-Smith's poetry, mostly English,
sometimes in lists. We might expect them to be markers of presence or
re-identification but more often they register absence. The centrepiece of Swallows is a
sequence entitled 'The Sabine Villa', improvised around accounts of the 18th
Century search for the remains of the farm which Horace received from
Maecenas in 33 B.C. The improvisations include 'Imitations from Horace', some
of which are channelled through Keats who is also seen (or, more pertinently,
not seen) 'at present alone at Wentworth Place'. The sequence is a powerful
re- or de-construction of the desire we feel to bring ourselves nearer a poet
by experiencing the everyday scenes of his or her life, just as we hope to
recover something of ourselves by revisiting a once-familiar place. Of course
we can do neither thing. Travellers scoured Italy for the Sabine Villa but
all that remains of the poet can be found in the Loeb edition and fits in
anyone's pocket - 'I have my Horace with me,' remarks Corless-Smith or maybe
Keats. To a poetry like this the identity of the voice is scarcely relevant.
In William Williamson's poetics 'in this poetry of fragment after fragment we
experience more than just the poem and its outside, we experience the
simultaneity of many poems, all poems, with their own ends and their
beginnings - their readings - intersecting - their lives in the space of
being read - on the page just now we see self-consciously noted a
fourth-dimensionality'. The final entry in Swallows is
headed 'Monday' and ends
Then I
looked out of my chair through the open window
I
really don't have much desire to do that
The
only thing I do desire
I won't
do that either
Horace's question 'What exile from his country ever escaped himself as well?'
is double-edged. The 'self' the exile necessarily carries with him is quite
other than the absence which neither desire nor migration will satisfy.
©
Alan Halsey 2006
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