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Daffodils,
Spices and Fugues |
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The poets under review are
risk-takers and, though one may applaud the ambition, there often remains a
gap between ambition and achievement. I am of the opinion that 'a good idea
for' a poem seldom turns into the genuine article, the risk being that an element
of the voulu, keeps getting in the
way. What desperately wants to be poetry can turn out to feel somewhat
cerebral and at worst end up sounding like an experiment or an exercise.
Joanna Boulter admits in her Author's Preface that reading a review of a book about the life of the
Russian composer Shostakovich caught her imagination 'as a possible subject
for poetry'. She then looked to the composer's piano work, his Op. 87 homage
to Bach, as a way of structuring her work. This, she says, 'gave me my format'.
Her 'project' is hugely ambitious but inevitably fraught with risk. It
requires the writer to compose 'a set of twenty preludes and fugues...in
words - the preludes in free or invented forms, and the fugues in any strict
poetic form, in the first person, as the voice of Shostakovich himself'. The
first risk is in matching Shostakovich's masterwork 'in words'; the second is
finding cogent literary equivalents for the fugues (are sestinas the
answer?); the third is in ventriloquising the composer himself; and finally a
fourth is to take on the immensity of the horrors of life in
twentieth-century Russsia. As well as enormous skill, it needs a proper
humility to address subjects poetry seems such an inadequate vehicle for. I
am not questioning the seriousness of intention motivating the writing of
these poems; what I am saying is that the gap between ambition and
achievement mentioned earlier is a real one: the writer must inevitably be
content with degrees of failure. There is still controversy surrounding the
life and real thinking of Shostakovich: Boulter's putting words in his mouth
makes me uneasy and feels like a dangerous form of special pleading. She may
have been taken over by the composer, with his undeniable problems of
artistic freedom within a repressive regime, but she hasn't become him: the
words she gives him are her words: |
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The poems in Ruth Leader's
The Peacock Room have their setting in
Thailand where she was born and brought up; and a sense of the exotic is part
of the experience of reading. However I wish she had thought of appending a
glossary for words like 'kwai', 'ong', 'sawan', 'jakagee' and so on. In my
view anything that interrupts the flow of reading and takes you back to the
previous line - even if you then 'get' what you'd missed - cannot be good. On
top of this and part of the same problem, where did she get the idea that
with portmanteau words you put the hyphen at the beginning of a line? For
example |
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Judy Kendall's The Brighter
The Drier enjoys being playfully
ambitious, experimental and is perhaps the most precisely worded poet of the
three...though for the life of me I can't see any reason for starting a line
or a poem with a comma. (Is there something editorially weird going on at
Cinnamon?) The poems have a crystalline quality. Take '5 am': |
