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On The Beach Are We Not Drawn..., Peter Philpott (111pp, £8.95, Shearsman Books) |
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Peter Philpott uses as an epigraph to his
new collection a palindrome quoted in Anne Michael's novel Fugitive Pieces: 'Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to a new era?'
There is something here that Philpott wants us to recognise in his spare
evocations of place: think Black Mountain poetry relocated to North-West
Somerset. For Philpott promising some kind of easy or sustained access to the
sublime will be problematic, as indicated in the opening of poem '49' where: at dawn what is drawn appears just like that! faint indentations darken the whole field glows illimitably illumined every time every time it happens something bad maybe they too will pass in the cold air they will vanish If the practice of writing is to offer
its author any solace in such a search then some things will have to be
jettisoned, re-thought or re-phrased. By the next poem '50' the ground has
already shifted so that clarity emerges as much, paradoxically, from the
increasing darkness as from the light: what is it lures me so onward? the shining path the dawn one time the coloured lit emptiness at dawn one time the world gone mysteriously soft often this happens again comedic I'd watch the lack of light on on on As a hundred poem sequence, Philpott's Are
We Not Drawn exemplifies one of the things that
poetry outside the mainstream can do, which is to be adventurous and
exploratory in its focus on language and process. Avoiding any sense of
triviality or easy emotion, Philpott holds resolutely to avant-garde impulses
whereby an inner, decentred voice is the best means to a rich but fractured
relationship between subtext and meaning, composition and poetics,
abstraction and nature. Each word is studied obsessively for both its imagery
and rightness of sound so that repeats, reversals and equivalences of line
then form into a kind of constructivist mirror, full of mimicry, as in '70'
where 'already losing the lines / after that many repetitions / faint &
worn down / what has been worn / up? / a clear & ludicrous joke /
lippetty loppetty usw' Number 'H 68' is the only poem in the
sequence where Philpott abandons his set procedure of the broken line 'to
hold them still / like cats about to pounce or / the sea drawn back'.
Demonstrating how such broken detail can be more compressed, the poem is
still shot through with obvious theorising about language, perception and the
process of writing itself: ... a game of stupid paradox, that contradicts itself and is therefore true, beautiful, and full of live intent & we ought to resist that consonantal chaff our language & our self
strimmed
out and stalled In '43', the most Becket-like poem of the
sequence, Philpott invites us to be party to his speaker's confused inner
state. 'Who am I listening to? / who' becomes an allusion to the unravelling
power and effect of estrangement: to who you can tell it's night just don't answer the questions whose questions? who's question? who is the question bloody hell I want to stop I want who who who wants to who As in many others of the sequence, the poem shows Philpott especially adept in capturing such bleakness, able to fruitfully probe the depths of human existential experience. His own cover photograph of a stark distant sea on the beach at Minehead seems especially emblematic of a mournful, liminal, reflective but ever-changing space which Philpott summons in his poems. In '29' we are told 'get ready to descend / on the beach / we all watch the sunset / all / we ever do', while in '22' we are reminded how 'this light / under the world / makes us see / how / briefly / we live'. This ability to achieve a constant yet conversely fragmented movement between the observed world and its representation, in other words, the way we actually mediate the components of everyday life, makes Are We Not Drawn a truly refreshing and remarkable reading experience. |
