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This book combines two of Peter Cole's volumes of poetry
that have previously been published separately in the United States. They are
Rift (1981) and Hymns &
Qualms (1998). I had not previously heard
of Cole and it is always refreshing to find work that is as different as
this. The perspectives here are unlike anything you will find in British
poetry; yet Cole, who lives in Israel and who translates medieval Hebrew into
English, is clearly familiar with British poetry. For a poet for whom pigeons
seem to be an abiding preoccupation, he is difficult to pigeonhole.
About two thirds of this book consists of a poetry with a distinct lyric
tone. The lines are very short, often one or two words only, and they snake
and zigzag down the page. The first poem, 'Alphabet', is worth quoting in
full:
A way
cut to
the letter:
the kept bud
stiffening to gem,
a rose
found in the foil
and
leaves
behind a hedge
at the station.
Its strict
whirl preserved
as gift.
Edge and place.
Breastpiece.
Under a facet
the light cracks
and scatters in on its hinge.
This is beautiful writing, I think with beauty as its subject, but something
bothers me about it. In the last two lines there is a quality of indeterminacy
that is characteristic of all of Cole's lyrical writing. A facet of what? If
the light is something that cracks, can it have a hinge? Why is it under a facet? How can a thing scatter in on its hinge?
If it is a description of a window, how does this fit in with the rest of the
poem? Or with the title? Once one starts looking for particulars in this
poem, there is a scattering; it is almost too delicate to bear
interpretation.
I have seen American poetry like this before: the lyrical voice, a free-floating
subject, pure, easeful description often without an obvious referent. Jorie
Graham springs to mind, there are many others. In my resistance to this I
think I carry the prejudice of too much immersion in British poetry, where
the lyric has been long excluded, either made to carry the burden of a loaded
subjective voice (the 'mainstream'), and hence pulled down by
particularities, or else represented as anti-lyric, a poetry of opposition.
Even when the lyric mode seems to recur, as we find with the poetry of John
Burnside, it is always a lyrical moment hinged and depending on a moment of
experience.
But a poetry of abstraction, of indeterminacy? Having heard so often that
poetry should be specific, denotative, and hard, it is a challenge to read a
poetry that is the opposite, I think as a deliberate choice. Reading through
this volume, Cole meets my empirical prejudice head-on. Cole again and again
chooses the abstract, the numinous, the unpindownable. Here is a section, one
whole page, from 'Ambit' (p. 76):
The lambent
nearness
there in the flaw
of truth
the act is:
where
everything
offered burns,
where most
of
what's withheld
begins
its decay
All the nouns here are abstract. 'Lambent' is an uglily poetic adjective that
would be hurled from any undergraduate poetry workshop. It is used however
with some accuracy, since it denotes the tongue-like flickering of flames. In
these lines I like the idea of action being the flaw in truth. And the short
sculpted lines work here, enacting the tenuity that is being referred to. The
poem 'Perfect Pitch' (p. 103) starts: 'Through thinking comes like / eyes to
lie' and ends 'but shining / slope to thinking's slope'. I think most British
poets would write 'thought', not 'thinking', because thought can be a physiological process, but thinking, as a verbal noun, is entirely abstract,
disembodied.
But there are occasions in these poems when the high, ungrounded language
lets the reader down. This is particularly so when we are asked to conceive
of abstractions by means of metaphors which relate to concrete terms or
processes. From 'Ambit', p. 84:
And language
in its nature
which,
chipping the infinite,
holds it in
its glass,
as ground.
Okay, I can think of language as somehow chipping away at that biggest of all
abstractions, infinity, perhaps as a chisel. But then to hold it in its
glass? So language has a chisel in one hand and a glass in the other. And to
hold it as 'ground' confuses me; surely it is glass that can be ground, or
else it is hard to imagine what is being chipped here - ground as in earth,
what we stand on? Held in a glass? Or glass as telescope? The terms do not cohere
in the way that we are trained to expect. On the next page in a description
of the night sky we find the line 'Constellation as gear to the swarm', which
sounds fine as a description of a group of stars at the centre of the milky
way, until you think; in what sense can a swarm have a gear? What is Doubled
in many of these poems are the metaphors.
Another locution that is rather too poetic for my taste is the [noun] of
[noun] construction: (I shall lineate this as prose to make it clearer): 'the
body/builds/its fort/of mettle/and hide/this wind/is siege/is bread for/blood
of the/pride's/hovel/and sty//through Noah's/robes/and choice/this wind
was/food for his/hope was/blood of that first//bird's flowing out and through
as/blackly/once/as river/of maybe/never/resuming/this/is flesh/of that
unknowing rushing/through/us the pulse/of guest/and
styptic/shawl/crystal/stress and awl of/....of if and whether through/us and
how' (Awl, 47-8). That's the same grammatical structure (one relatively rare
in speech) recurring eight times on two pages. A bad habit? On page 110
instead of the normal olive-grove, Cole writes 'groves of olive'. This kind
of mannerism indicates to me (and I may be wrong) a certain unawareness on
Cole's part of the tendency in his poetry towards conjuring one abstraction
from another.
But when in these poems Cole does write about something specific, it is
wonderful. At one point he climbed onto his roof (climbing and flight are
central in these poems) and sees a dead cat:
The skin
leathery
across the small
potato of a
skull
stretched
an ear
hooked
gently over
and stiffened
the pin-like
teeth
the tail no
thicker
than a large worm
no longer
lungs and
stomach
gone the unclever
spine expose
to the
glazed sky
I'd climbed that morning.
('Leviticus' 63)
These lines are an achievement any writer would envy. After several
re-readings I still can't decide if some of these lyrics work.
The volume contains much else besides: a prose journal, some great
translations from Hebrew writers, some more conventional poems. They all read
well and make it clear that Cole is not a writer prone to grandiosity or
pretension. This is the Doubling that Cole means in his title. The epigraph
he uses is from Keith Douglas: 'Perhaps one day cynic and lyric will meet and
make me a balanced style'. Douglas never had the chance. Let's hope Cole
does.
© Giles Goodland
2006
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