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Writing the Loved World
Horses Where the Answers
Should Have Been. New and Selected Poems, Chase Twitchell (253pp, £9.95, Bloodaxe)
Whale, Darragh Breen
(69pp, no price, November Press)
Shape of Time, Doris
Kareva (140pp, no price, Arc)
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Describing a moment in her embattled American
childhood, Chase Twitchell writes 'that's when I first wandered off / into
the white pastures on my own / with nothing but a spiky quiver of words / and
an urgent question' ('Math Trauma'). It's what she's still doing - the white
pastures have become the Appalachian landscape where she now lives, the poems
ask the questions. Twichell describes her landscape in precise and beautiful
detail ('yarrow's coarse lace', 'sky-coloured chicory flowers', 'a twig of
orange leaves' ; she's also afraid for it, and with the fearlessness of
Cormac McCarthy's dystopian novel The Road, she writes about a future 'after the loved
world dies', of the planet with its 'lacerated wilderness' and 'dark plumes
trailing the highway's / diesel moan'.
This is far more than a book of 'nature poems', though - the urban is
dissected too (in 'the Hudson's
starved and beaten ghost', for example in 'The Whirlpool', and there are
gritty poems about a childhood with its 'circus of semen and murder', with Twichell
'slumming in the ghost-lands / of memory', as she puts it.
Twichell also writes self-deprecatingly about her life as a Zen Buddhist, ('I
like distraction,' she says in 'Sayonara Marijuana Mon Amour', 'I must not want to be fully
enlightened', and raises questions about how to 'be in the moment' and to
write about it. In 'Clouds and water' she apologises:
Sorry, these
words are just
the sound of
shovel hitting ledge.
Who wouldn't
rather listen
to the ins
and outs of wind
the freezing and thawing of water...
Elsewhere she writes of how 'language smudges and erases', and how when she
describes something 'it's only
the husks of their names / that I've gathered and paralyzed' ('Makeshifts).
But luckily for her readers, Twichell goes on trying to do this impossible
thing and doing it breathtakingly well. This fat selected and new is full of
exploratory, ambitious poems from a poet who's travelled a long way with her
'spiky quiver of words'.
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The Irish poet Darragh Breen's second
collection is seeped in recurring images of sea, ice, moon (a Victorian glass
toy) and inhabited by dogs, pigs, horses, crows and whales, all viscerally
and precisely described. In 'Pig Tales', for example:
We pulled
back the still-trembling fleshy ear
of the
freshly slaughtered pig
to reveal the
smooth moon
that lay
beneath.
Even the landscape is animal here with 'a bat-swarm of dead leaves' or
'clouds the colour of whale flesh' and a poem entitled 'Pieta' is about a an
'udder-heavy' cow and her dead calf.
The book's tour de force
is its long central poem, 'The Asylum of the Soul', which draws unforced
parallels between Irish emigrant ships on their way across the Atlantic and
earlier slave ships: 'Mere patches of / humanity on ships of bark, / mere
morsels fasting on / Sailors Biscuits and whale bait', for example. Even when those who survive reach
land it's to 'No Irish' signs, the 'almshouse / shadows' of Staten Island or
the 'Typhus province of ice-bound / Canada.'This is powerful, political poem
that demands to be read aloud.
Elsewhere there are strong poems about 'Goya as a wolf'' ('He wants this
light, to devour it, / to feel its warmth within his ribs') and Francis
Bacon's crucifixion paintings, with the artist visiting an abattoir ('the
rivers split / from an atlas-worth of veins that / he would sculpt into the
clotted jellyfish forms...').
This is a dense, rich book of poems, with its surreal prose poems and
original images ('the faint oranged-reds / glimpsed in the bog pools / of an
emptied Connemara lanscape / as the dark sod / eats the sun') all revelling
in language. Only the final love
lyrics feel a bit flat in comparison to the violence and energy elsewhere,
and the book isn't done any favours by its drab grey cover - Breen deserves
something much more eyecatching to draw readers in to his strange and potent
poetry.
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After these two poets, Doris Kareva's Shape
of Time, translated from
Estonian, seems somewhat bloodless and abstracted. Kareva trained as a philologist,
and these sequences of short untitled poems often explore ideas about
language: 'The blood of language roars in a verb' she writes, and 'see / language burst, proud and
frenzied, / ancient, awful, and fresh, / into unbelievable blossoms' .Yet there's
a sense in which her poetry is 'showing not telling' these facts about
language; typically and abstrusely she writes of 'the letters of a wordless word' and occasionally her
aphoristic lines verge into new-ageish blandness: 'He who belongs in the universe / shares with everyone' (61) or
'Whoever has learned to love / has learned to die'. Kareva's poetry is
probably more meaty in the original, though: the dual translation shows long
compound words in the Estonian which, when they occasionally get translated
as one word ('painstone', 'mudpuddle', 'firesmoky'), add energy to the poems.
Amongst the abstractions, Kareva's concrete images stand out powerfully -
a seaside house as 'a ship just landed', 'the thoughtful taste of wild
thyme', 'the light in the groves' yellow copse' all give a sense of her
northern landscape, and occasionally she alludes to her country's past: 'I am
chilled by history. / All borders are cages.' These are intellectually
ambitious poems, whose structure with its riffs and repetitions nods towards
music, but they lack the gutsy vitality of Breen and Twichell whose poems
make the 'loved world' so physical and sensual.
©
Elizabeth Burns 2010
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