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John Phillips' poetry mixes an intriguing minimalism with
a philosophical enquiry into the relation between language, the world and
ourselves. Although his work refers indirectly to Heraclitus and
Wittgenstein, there's a lightness of touch here, which makes these short
lyrics satisfying and approachable, even though they are also puzzling and
mind-bending, somewhat akin to R.D. Laing's Knots.
Take 'river clouds', for example.
river clouds
going
no
where
twice
Which has a neat lyrical feel as well as being explicable and existentially
suggestive.This is not a description which induces angst or puzzlement but
reflection and, dare I say it, positive thought, in the best sense of the term!
The
following section from 'Black and White' has a similar feel to start with,
then - due mainly to its 'treble-negative', I think, - turns into something
more puzzling:
Look, the
sky's still there.
It doesn't
even surprise you. As if
one day soon
you will
not look up
and see
nothing
looking back
at no one
looking.
What this does is to force the readers to focus on the way we all take
language for granted. Phillips plays with our 'unexamined cliches' and the
way in which we think we are describing the world we exist in when we talk or
write about it. There's an estranging quality about his writing which rather
than creating anxiety or fear induces curiosity, not just about the world
possibly, but our place in it and the way in which language, because
'immediate' and 'unconscious', has a mediating function which inevitably
creates a gap between subject and description. While linguists and
philosophers have engaged with this dilemma across the centuries, Phillips
has developed his craft and skill to such a degree that the process becomes a
kind of gentle enquiry whereby the action of writing - and thinking about
writing - becomes somehow naturalised to the point that while there's an
element of game-playing going on there is also an approach to the world which
has the feel of 'natural philosophy'. The fact that these poems are also
pleasurable to read, ponder, puzzle over and (usually) come to no definite
conclusion about, is simply our good luck. This is a rare field which John
Phillips is ploughing and we are the richer for his efforts:
That story
you always thought
you had to
tell was never yours
to know or
tell Even so
you tried to
tell it just
the same As if any story told
proved the
teller true
You sort of know what he's getting at here and just when you think you've
grasped it entirely (didn't MacNeice write a poem about this?) the whole
thing proves elusive and elsewhere. A bit like that feeling of dejavu. I
loved reading these poems for a whole variety of reasons. Great stuff.
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The Commons is a
neat, pocket-size edition with cover artwork that could easily have introduced
Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium. Which is kind of appropriate, since Bonney's new
collection is filled with reference to seventeenth century submerged cultural
groupings, to the Paris Commune and to the 1917 revolution in Russia as well
as the student uprisings in 1968. The Selected Resources section at the end
of this 80 page booklet suggests the use of montage as a key method here and
Bonney's repeated echoes from folk song - Thomas the Rhymer, for example - suggest a militant, hidden, cultural
and political opposition to the oppressive powers of government and
capitalism itself. There are also many references to zombies - The
Night of the Living Dead appears to be a
favourite film - and an intuitively anarchic, somewhat republican mood is created
throughout this impressive collection of untitled 14-liners. As Bonney
apparently says of himself:
I seem to
have anarchic tendencies
but I hang
around with Trots.
These are mainly short-line poems, which veer between working individually 'as
lines' but often run over and create strange connecting near narratives which
force you to think about what is being said or suggested. I'd say that Tom
Raworth was a big influence here and Bonney's mixing of different sorts of
language breaks that smooth, controlling sense of an 'authorial voice' -
these are ranting fragments which jar and provoke yet there's a musicality to
this writing which makes you want to read the work quickly and without too
much interruption. These are mainly dystopian poems I'd say, using the past
to respond critically to the here and now, the ongoing crisis that we're in,
but there are more idealistic elements involved and I also find myself
discovering in Bonney's work, a sense of humour, something I've not really
picked up before:
I bet she did
I bet she
got up &
performed his ambitions
malevolent
shine
gonna build
me a log cabin
night of the
living dead
jokes about
gordon brown
something
called the english democrats
on fire:
she would
beat them to ashes
with a ring
of teeth
& roses-
say cuckoo-
got up this
morning
performed my
alienations
The title presumably refers to the seat of government, clearly in a
dismissive, non-deferential manner, but may also refer indirectly to 'the
commoners', the less-than-powerful victims of the city and of advanced
capitalism. Bonney is working within a 'repressed' literary tradition, using
Christopher Hill and left-leaning prog. rock, among other unusual
combinations, to say something acerbic, new and splenetic, in a scholarly
kind of way, about the nation state and the wider world. His use of
repetition aids the musicality and produces strange juxtapositions, which
amuse, provoke and attack. Altogether a splendid collection and Sean Bonney's
best work for some time, I think.
© Steve Spence 2012
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