Hang Loose

John Wilkinson, Contrivances. Salt, 2003.180pp. £9.95 / $13.95 US / $18.95 Cdn. 1-876857-60-9.

If you were reading Wilkinson through the 1990s then his first Salt book, Effigies Against the Light, came as familiar territory seen from a fresh perspective: its component sections had already been aired independently as chapbooks throughout the decade. Contrivances is a different beast: only one of its four sections has appeared independently (Signs of an Intruder, Parataxis, 2001), and even magazine appearances of the work have been few. One way into the book is the long final section, “Case in Point,” which Wilkinson has usefully discussed in his talk “Mouthing Off,” published in Quid 7b. The “point” of the title is addressed & reinvoked repeatedly in these poems, a kind of poetic McGuffin like Raworth’s ace or Coolidge’s crystal: it’s an object which itself remains obscure – Wilkinson calls it a “fetish,” an “unstated obsession” which lies behind the text but is never named – but whose real significance is in the chains of association & image that spin off it. There are a lot of things in these poems, very often coming bundled together as plurals, and there’s a lot of things happening, as if he were describing regular occurrences in a world whose physics and natural history aren’t exactly those of ours even if it seems alarmingly familiar nonetheless. Preoccupied by the play of inside & outside, of secreted kernel of meaning & protective surface or receptacle, these poems are infested by bags & boxes. They change in shape, size & function: the box, for instance, is by turns an airplane black-box, a reliquary, a computer, a stuffed ballot box, a jewel-box (for treasure or a CD), a bento box, a lead coffin for spent radioactive fuel rods, a safe, a Donald Judd box in a gallery. The central “point,” too, multiplies and diversifies, becoming piles of seed or grain, clouds of pollen, pearls of semen.

The politics of food is one of Contrivances’ most consistent preoccupations, and in “Case in Point” the bags are, for instance, sacks of grain carried by convoys of trucks and distributed by foreign humanitarian food-aid services among populaces ground down by war and famine – as long as the food’s not first grabbed by gangsters & soldiers. Occasional details suggest the scene is Africa , though in “Mouthing Off” Wilkinson says he had Bosnia in mind (but what does he know?). The most frequently mentioned body part is the mouth, site of consumption & enunciation; as so often with Wilkinson there’s a messy physicality to it (in a Wilkinson poem things tend to sag, hang open, flop, flap &c), so it’s itself a kind of pouch, purse or bag that gapes open & flaps shut. The mouth is a fitting emblem for a text which, while it rarely steps back & hands you a generalizable statement on a platter (when he drops in a blunt polemical statement – “But there is no such thing as ‘the’ other” – it’s startlingly untypical), is nonetheless constantly addressing you: as with Prynne, an unusually high number of sentences are commands. The point being, I think, the way that a command suggests how speaker and address (who could well be the same person) are imbricated in – really, squashed up against – an understood context: a command is not a point of origination, but always comes in medias res. It’s an appropriate syntactic device in poems so thoroughly informed by a sense of how the world’s enormous but finite resources have been used, reused, fought over, eroded and piled back up, soiled and cleaned and resoiled. The poems do offer recurrent glimpses of a pure “blue sky,” though, an enigmatic, quite possibly untrustworthy hint of purity & calm; it’s no surprise when in the penultimate poem it gets messed up, in lines suggesting both degradation & fertility: “The blue sky smeared / with shit, alive with presentiments.”

Short shrift for the book’s other sequences, though they all deserve an unpacking; there’s space here only for a nod at “Saccades,” easily Wilkinson’s densest and most intricate text since Sarn Helen. Its first three sections (of four) are called “Runs”: this suggests both print-runs (xerox machines turn up in the sequence’s pool of images) and film-runs. The poems are arranged descending & ascending page by page; the title’s allusion to the jerky workings of the eye suggests Wilkinson is miming a flip-book, a low-tech form of film-projector. I’m inclined to think the allusions to architecture in the (authorial?) blurbs on both Effigies & Contrivances aren’t accidental: the office routines & bureaucracy that form one thread of “Saccades” are set within the architectural anthills of city officebuildings: “In the fullness of rising over the world to reach, / impersonally as the full need always freshens the arc-en-cièle / divisible as a sky freed from earth shudders, / the hitherto durable earth heaps up in vague statements.” Salt’s instabook format doesn’t do justice to “Saccades”’ visual intricacies – prolonged tracts, for instance, have poems set on the verso, with just three lines spilling over to the recto, something any sensitive designer would avoid – but it’s still an impressive sequence, its erotic motifs having a tangled fleshiness that reminds me of Merleau-Ponty: “When touch stops up at fingers to protect what touching / hooks & tears, skin being held / negligible, will their depths too be cauterised, contained?” “What separates us spreads the sheet on which we couple. / What unites draws its strength / from what stays unlinked. What is shared divorces. Such / is my integument is yours, / swirling in its bias cut clings & falls, a veil hides & gapes / responsively.”

Effigies Against the Light actually got some respectful mainstream press coverage – will wonders never cease? – which I suspect may with the usual pendulum logic make for a more muted response to this new book. If so, that will be a pity: of the two it’s the more consistently rewarding – Effigies does have a few dull stretches (much of “Reverses,” e.g.). Among Salt’s prodigious recent output Contrivances is a standout.

Nate Dorward

Published in The Gig 15