Mutual Contradiction, Common Measure

Kelvin Corcoran, New and Selected Poems. Shearsman, 2004. 196pp. £10.95 / $16.95 US. 0-907562-39-6.

Ian Davidson, Harsh. Spectacular Diseases, 2003. 45pp. £7.50. 0-946904-69-3. (Paul Green, 83(b) London Rd., Peterborough , Cambs., PE2 9BS , UK)

Ian Davidson, At a Stretch. Shearsman, 2004. 109pp. £8.95 / $13.25 US. 0-907562-44-2.

Ian Davidson, Human Remains & Sudden Movements. West House, 2003. 23pp. £3.50. 1-904-052-10-X. (Alan Halsey, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN, UK; alan AT nethedge DOT demon DOT co DOT uk)

Ralph Hawkins, The MOON, The Chief Hairdresser (highlights). Shearsman, 2004. 110pp. £8.95 / $13.95 US. 0-907562-42-6.

With Shearsman’s shift to print-on-demand its publishing program has stepped into high gear. While the mode of production entails a few compromises (the print is sometimes too light) it’s nonetheless good to see these books reach print. Shearsman’s editor, Tony Frazer, attended the University of Essex in the 1970s, as did Davidson, Corcoran & Hawkins, so there’s an unstated link between these publications. It’s an institutional nexus that deserves a proper history one of these days – besides Frazer, Davidson, Corcoran & Hawkins, such a history would include figures like Douglas Oliver, Charles Ingham, Simon Pettet, Tony Lopez, Paul Brown & John Muckle (later the instigator of Paladin’s New British Poetry), & touch on the visits or longer spells at Essex by Raworth, Dorn, Harwood, Berrigan, Notley, Waldman & Peter Riley as well as publications like Ochre, The Human Handkerchief & Active in Airtime.

Corcoran is given high if bizarre praise by Andrew Duncan on the back of New and Selected Poems: “Corcoran emerged into view around 1985, with the piquantly titled Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, and has produced consistently ever since – something which is true of no other individual.” But Corcoran’s not as dully “consistent” a “producer” as all that, thank god. The book is in reverse chronological order, & poking around in the back suggests that Corcoran’s poetry only really snapped into focus once he set aside the run-together prosody of the first few books and honed the endstopped three- or four-beat lines that fully emerge circa TCL (1989). Stacked one after the other without too much syntactic traffic-direction, these lines often come bundled in quatrains like hymns or ballads – indeed, he titles two poems “Why I Like the Psalms” and “Common Measure.” The poems are grounded in prosaic, slightly idyllic scenes from ordinary life – a quiet day in the garden, children playing, the commute to work – which get sliced across by tart, epigrammatic political commentary. It’s not so far from some of Peter Riley’s work, despite the greater frustration and anger in Corcoran’s poems: there’s a similar sifting of experience for moments of lyric wonder (especially in encounters with the face of the loved Other) and a sense of the world as for good and for ill “the site of deep assent.” Starting with parts of Melanie’s Book (1996), and more thoroughly in When Suzy Was (1999), Corcoran’s poetry becomes strongly informed by the time he’s spent in recent years in Greece . The travelogue & use of myth is striking, but equally important are its meditations on political empire past & present. This fresh vein of material is further explored in two fine, previously unpublished collections, Against Purity & My Life With Byron, reproduced here unabridged; there are also some pieces from my favourite among Corcoran’s recent books, his collaboration with Alan Halsey, Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (available from West House).

I picked up Ian Davidson’s Human to Begin With (Poetical Histories, 1991) from Peter Riley (Books) years ago and was fascinated by its picaresque seriocomedy, pitched somewhere between James Kelman and Tom Raworth, but at the time it was virtually his only published book. The new trio of publications sets this situation to rights, and it’s an eye-opener (though Gig readers will – as always! – be ahead of the curve, since some of this work appeared in issues 6 & 11). Harsh is earlier work than the other two. It is, as an antique dealer would say, “distressed” – indeed, a square of fine sandpaper is stitched into the centre of the book.* The original poems, written over three years on the laptop provided by an otherwise unpleasant job, were later crunched up and spat out again as distended quasi-sonnets. There’s a continual tension between the individually sharp & ponderable phrases and the massive lines and blocks of text which virtually swallow them up. Some of it could be called “nature poetry,” I suppose – but a nature poetry completely wired, plugged-in and mediated, verging on the territory of John Wilkinson ’s contemporaneous Welsh sequence Sarn Helen: “Signals witter into multiple receivers wired through the sky, / fragile blossom waves uncertainly in a light wind oozing from the reed beds. / Under slow exposure a blur before the stone walls, incessant selfishness sullen and angry, // game plans as clear as crystal.” Though the sequence is a tad overextended (39 very dense pages) it’s fascinating stuff, not least for being so uncharacteristically angular and contrary.

At a Stretch is Davidson’s first booklength collection, divided into six sections ranging from tight haiku-like pieces to the surprisingly discursive last section, “On the Way.” Davidson speaks of the section divisions as “porous,” “the parts bleed[ing] into each other,” and that’s a capsule description too of how the poems work, full of long unpunctuated runs of phrases flowing irregularly across line- and stanzabreaks. The effect is as if the author’s thoughts and images were so stuck together they had to be set down all at once; or as if a thought had to be followed out to its full extent before the track grew cold; or as if an anecdote had to be told in a single breath. Davidson is on record (in his contribution to Removed for Further Study) as being fascinated with maps, with their coiled-up potential for pathways and tracing and travel: the theme turns up again here, as part of a general curiosity and puzzlement about where one is within the landscape and within the social matrix. The poems approach abstract themes with strange tactility: movements of thought and feeling are charted by images like piling a heap of pebbles, diving into a wreck, throwing breadcrumbs on the water for fish, following a path or the contours of an object, sorting trash, searching in the basement:

. . . and fit my fingers into shapes so familiar that the borders blur
I sit in the corner of an empty house and dream in short bursts whatever
his good intentions scattered in a pile of trash
poking about in the dark cellars of his mind
he came up with death watch beetle, wet rot

on the other hand

shapes emerged which were
down-trodden and washed smooth
their origins undetectable

Davidson’s Human Remains & Sudden Movements is in many ways of a piece with At a Stretch, but there’s an additional fluidity to the prosody, the phrases spilling over stanzabreaks like water over the lip of a fountain basin. The imagery in the book’s first half is dense and interlocking: water, folds, waves, bays and islands and shore and lighthouse, columns and arches, marble, ruins, Welsh chapels, excavations, fossils, bones and ancient burial sites, monuments, the politics of architecture and landscape, political violence ancient & modern. Circa section 10 the sequence gets terser and more fragmentary, with an understated bleakness & sense of entrapment not so evident in At a Stretch: “the gap between the sea and the / shore close up // tea turns to dust / an immediate experience // take material pulverise it (alcohol breaks / down barriers add water make it art”; “I wrote specifically as if I could do otherwise / the totality escapes me the folds that matter makes up”; “just forget it // what is worth saying / what is worth saving.” (Is that last couplet a despairing shrug or an assertion of what remains potent within one’s language & memory?) I’d recommend all three books, but for a quick taster of Davidson’s work this West House chapbook is an ideal place to start.

The MOON, The Chief Hairdresser (Highlights) is Ralph Hawkins’ first booklength collection since the underrated At Last Away (Galloping Dog, 1988); the historical/stylistic territory has shifted away from the Chinese poetry that informs At Last Away and the wonderfully titled The Coiling Dragon / The Scarlet Bird / The White Tiger / A Blue & Misted Shroud (Equipage, 2000), into other fields: it often reads like it’s worked from the heavily doodled & graffitied margins of a European art history coursebook. It’s a book that rules nothing out between the poles of abrupt nonsense & quite straightforward anecdotal-style writing: there are poems that offer Irish fairy-lore read through Williams’ plea for forgiveness for raiding the icebox; credulous Aubreyan reports of airborne signs & wonders & apocalyptic portents obliquely touching on the invasion of Iraq; poems like shuffled & reshuffled decks of cards (like Raworth’s “You’ve Ruined My Evening / You’ve Ruined My Life”); poetry about poetry & even poetry about poetry about poetry. There’s the odd dead spot in the jumpier, more freewheeling main section of the book, but the four short sequences at the back are consistently marvellous – try the valediction at the end of “Part One Puškin,” for instance, wavering between regret, resignation & continued need:

ah you have it, we are mutually contradictive
what is there for you in my name
do you think the fish feels like this raised from the water
why am I snapping the pages shut
why is the bird’s beak like a razor with red
please put the fish back
put the blue back in the sky
paint the waxed sun grease once more all over my dry lips

Nate Dorward

Published in The Gig 17