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Both of these books are by
internationalists - Samuels, currently resident in New Zealand, grew up in
the United States, Sweden, and the Middle East whilst Etter, born in the US,
has lived in the UK for some time. As a consequence they both bring something
fresh to their British publications, whilst also being clearly informed by
British writing in various ways. Both poets also seem committed to pursuing
the question of what lyric poetry can be after the phenomenon of Language
writing, putting their work in the company of writers like Jennifer Moxley
and Lisa Jarnot.
Lisa Samuels' second book with Shearsman is a breathless, sustained argument
which pushes new lyric writing to its limit and beyond. Comprising 45 poems,
only a few of which are more than one or two pages long, The Invention of
Culture is an inquiry into the tensions between
language and experience, between the ideal and the actual, and between the
abstract and the concrete:
No, don't get
that - back from it, we are
too apparent
each, all commas and elucting
what nature
gave us
('Civitas')
What is thrilling about this book is the intensity of its verbal art, really
thinking inside language, whilst celebrating
its sensuousness. The poems court but resist their knowingness, play with
puns, offer wry generic games (the book presents us with a 'lecture', a
'novel' and a 'play in the round') and sing with abandon:
There is a
mechanism for beauty, I think - kind eyes
blurry eyes,
fortuitous sight mode fret.
To hanker,
that was it. A grievance felt through stones
to trees. In
that city language fierce defined.
('Progress
(a lecture)')
This intensity is a risk, which Samuels registers with a subtle irony
throughout, although one that I feel occasionally dips into bathos in lines
like: 'the time is tipsy top, hivsies havesies about it really' ('The five
enslavements: a novel in four parts', p. 55), or 'In finite mathematics of
sway // minded axes hew their way' ('Witness', p. 49). This bathos also comes
through in occasional ventriloquising of what sound like British influences,
whether it be J.H. Prynne, Wordsworth or generic neo-classical verse: 'Sing
ruse of famish contumely' ('Increment (A Family Romance)'p.70). That such
moments are tolerated is integral to the self-consciously permissive verbal
texture, although I wonder how these gestures would come across in
performance.
Nevertheless, the real strength of the book is the way in which it negotiates
a post-postmodern poetics of selfhood in relation to language: through
gender, desire and writing. A figure for this might be the 'two locations /
inside one inter / locutor' ('Political poem', p. 16) which leads to a kind
of negative capability:
what I mean
is detached
kindly,
floating in
mention, no
particular
space in mind
('Political poem')
Although these lines could almost be read against the poem's title, elsewhere
Samuels' political vision shines through more urgently. We can certainly read
the 'culture' of the book's title as akin to art, thus addressing as much the
inventiveness of culture itself - as well as its origins - which Samuels
positions against 'the broken habits of culture' ('Fire skin with the
cell-phone execution on', p. 20). Such broken habits are ambiguously a source
of positive 'resistance' and of risk: that they might lead to 'stringing up
your bad-ass hard-won fate' ('Fire skin' p. 20). Elsewhere the political role
of creative writing is qualified in terms such as 'the future was waiting in
the form of imagination' ('Portrait d'un homme', p. 39), which reads like a
statement Shelley would have agreed with.
In a book which is bursting with the vivid seductions of language, Samuels
is still a complex enough writer to admit the possibility that 'words might
seek truth / instead of themselves' ('Song: City's End', p. 60). It is lines
like these which make me eager to see how her thinking develops in her next
book Tomorrowland, due from Shearsman in March
2009.
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Etter's elegant pamphlet from Leafe
Press, printed by Poetry Monthly, is a preview
to two forthcoming collections: from Seren in 2009 and Shearsman in 2010.
Comprised of 18 poems, 11 bear the title 'Divining for Starters' followed by
a numeral, suggesting these are parts of the book to be published by
Shearsman of the same title. The remaining 8 poems have more a feel of
occasional pieces. The first poem in the collection opens:
Out of the
vernacular as the sky drains of light
The body
heavy with a day's work that gravity
What would it
mean to aspire to transcendence?
('Diving
for Starters (16)')
Etter's technique is far more understated than Samuels', yet, as this opening
demonstrates, there are shared themes between the two in the exploration of
the relationships between language, the body and the abstract. As this poem
develops it makes very subtle distinctions: 'call it a knowledge / Not the
self - think of consciousness as steam' which show Etter also conducting her
thinking within poetry, within language.
Technically Etter often makes use of the arresting juxtapositions of new
sentence writing (in both prose and lineated forms) but counterpoints these
with threaded-through continuities that generate more settled overall
arguments. This is used to great effect in 'Paternal', which hints at family
illness, even death, but in a way which keeps pathos firmly at bay:
A
parent a plinth. The first week he regarded hospital as hotel. So
the
variables include the kind of stone, its consistency, the velocity
of
prevailing winds. What's purer than an infidel's prayer? How
strangely, in the second week, the swollen limbs stiffened.
Elsewhere this technique simply allows more space into the poem, and for the
mind to savour the relationships between images as much as the images
themselves:
considering
human cell division
that piling days
indicate toppling hours
here the
cellist raises her bow
(what now on
the leaf)
('Divining
for Starters (2)')
I don't always feel that the occasional poems quite match up to the strength
of the 'Divining' sequence - a mini-travelogue in 7 parts entitled 'Alaskan'
risks a few odd notes when sound play gets excessive 'purpled cluster thrust'
(p. 18), or action bathetic 'a moose nods' (p. 18) or the enjambed
juxtaposition a little heavy 'amorphous swathes of / persist among fuller' (p.
21). A cut-up of a found text 'Estate Management' feels a bit clunky; the
juxtapositions not quite knitting together. However, these slips are scarce
and minor and don't detract from the overall quality.
One of the strongest poems in the book impressed me when it first appeared in
Shearsman magazine. 'The Occupation of Iraq' uses the same new sentence
technique to interweave three main discourses together: a plan to plant
daffodils before going away to France, a description of wounds and a bad
dental experience. The dental pain is intense, the flowers bloom and die and
the narrator fears being on the receiving end of anti-American feeling whilst
abroad:
The
dentist overfilled
the canal,
sent the sealant six millimeters into
the lingual
nerve, delivered six hectares of misery.
On the first
night, someone said Canadienne when I
Feared Americaine, and I smiled.
The power of the poem lies again in its holding of easy sentiment at bay and
its political charge is enhanced by understatement:
There is no
exponent to relate my worst pain
to an entire
country's wounds.
Yet is an excellent introduction to Etter's
work for British readers and promises much for her new books due this year
and next.
In conclusion, these two writers taken together provide an excellent insight
into what is most active and exciting in new lyric poetry. Both seek to
boldly and tenaciously reinvent the lyric in response to contemporary
concerns and, in so doing, answer to the endless, hypnotic pull of language.
©
Scott Thurston 2009
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