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Seren's producing lovely
books these days. Inroads has
one of the most striking covers I've seen on a poetry book, using an image by
the American photographer Jamie Baldridge. 'Ten-Penny Prophet', as the image
is called, isn't anything to do with the title poem (about giving blood), so
I assume it's offered as an image 'about' the process of writing poetry. A
young woman at a table set with an immaculate cloth, her head in a birdcage,
manipulates quills over a parchment by fine threads attached to her thumbs
and forefingers, with some difficulty it appears. She's wearing a virginal
corset. Or maybe it's a ballet dress.
Of course as soon as you convert an image to Heavy Metaphor like this, you
lose sight of what was so striking about it in the first place, its visual power, the immaculate mysteriousness of it, with
its restricted colour range, (which is offset well against the burgundy of
the rest of the cover), the smoothness of the cloth and how its white tones
are beautifully graded as your eye slips left to right across the image and
then back to the figure, the ambiguous brown darkness of the space and the
delicacy of what's set against it. Like many of Jamie Baldridge's images, it
plays with the difference between the 'reality' a camera can give you and a
more dreamlike 'truth' beyond it.
I'm spending time thinking about the cover because it raises a surprising
question: can a cover be too
striking? That looks interesting,
friends say, picking it out from the piles on my table. It makes for very
high expectations. Can I think of anyone writing up to this polish and
sophistication? I'm not sure I can.
*
I keep coming across sestinas, an outbreak for which I hold creative writing
courses responsible. Carolyn Jess-Cooke comes through the trial by sestina
with flying colours in 'Jet Lag', her end-words slipping delightfully between
'coax' and 'Cokes' for example, or 'touch-down' substituted for 'landing'.
And, by way of a comment on the whole process, she also uses one of her
end-words to slip in an extra line to subvert the form: 'Yet jet lag has no
predictable pattern.'
Such playful enjoyment of language characterises much of her writing. In
'Pure', she repeats lines, shifting their meaning with punctuation.
'Second-Hand Words', a poem whose epigraph is about finding words to affirm
affection, gallops along risking homophones for its end-words. Here's how it
opens:
Today is the
day of rogue acceptances, when an ear becomes a weir
for the
winning word. So watch your syntax. We're
playing
frisbee with linguistics on the construction site
of
authenticity. It's too late to bolt at the sight
of roses.
This is not one-read writing of course. But after a few reads I find I'm
wanting something a bit easier on the ear: fun with language is all very
well, but not something I take to if it's at the expense of music Ð like that
'lingistics on the construction site of authenticity'. (Try saying it!) And
maybe something a bit more visual for the imagination too: that frisbee's
head stuff. As is this, from 'First Time Buyer':
I'm only
buying because I know
I can sell,
you know, because this ladder
is apparently
a one way street
for those in
the know, and because I woke up one morning
and realised
that the word home had no image
behind it,
that I'd
attributed one word and one dialect
to countless
continents, countries streets people.
Surely this
would result eventually in a crisis of identity?
Carolyn Jess-Cooke's playful intelligence ranges over Turkey, Japan,
Australia, karaoke, Orpheus, childhood memory... Her register shifts, and
slows, in her poems of pregnancy and mothering. In '5 Months' she writes of
A small blue
crown
on the gas
hob
unnoticed all
day.
Shoes stacked
in the
fridge.
Focus flapping
in the mind's
lampshade.
Her voice is movingly tender in 'Newborn', answering her own question 'What
are you like?' with a whole poemful of images like 'a nub of warm dough' and
'a slow waving field fattening with wheat'. In her prose poem, 'A Poem
Without Any Vegetables' she can also catch the desperation of a parent in a
supermarket with a child who 'roots herself to the spot', but even in this
circumstance, she doesn't lose her good humour and wit.
© Jane Routh
2010
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