Reviews
Mark McGuinness reviews Brian Henry’s Graft (Arc) and Maggie Sawkins’ Charcot’s Pet (Flarestack Publishing, 41 Buckley’s Green, Alvechurch, Birmingham B48 7NG, ISBN 1900397528, £3)
Brian Henry’s Graft is not a book for reading late at night. Not because it will give you bad dreams, but because it will give you a headache. More than most poets, reading Henry requires a clear head and a nimble mind. For instance, try getting to grips with this when you’re tucked up in bed with a mug of Ovaltine:
said of the something parted by telepathic
particulars
none deserved fortune’s bath
the cleavage of the matter in clear view
wants accumulated like passages
night its own coat-hanger…(Infirm)
As with Henry’s first collection, Astronaut, questions like ‘What’s it about?’ or ‘But what does it mean?’ often have to take a back seat while reading Graft, in favour of a willingness to enjoy the writer’s verbal and metaphorical ingenuity. For example, one of several poems titled This Blueness Not All Blue starts with the beautiful and intriguing line “It resembled a sun but could feather” and proceeds through a series of evocative comparisons, without ever spelling out exactly what the “it” is:
The sound of the touch of the she it resembled
seared into your scrap of a body as you
slipped from those arms and wondered
what it wouldn’t have been like to fly
Here metaphor becomes a disorienting device, as the poem jumps in quick succession from a “sound” to a “touch” to a “she” to an “it” to a “scrap” to a “body” – like watching a cartoon Proteus switching shapes – before slipping “from those [whose?] arms” and vanishing through a negative conjecture like a trapdoor, without even a full stop to hold on to at the end. The effect can be bewildering but also exhilarating, and Henry displays a linguistic and intellectual exuberance comparable to Paul Muldoon. Although Henry and Muldoon are stylistically distinct, they are both lyrically gifted poets who are apparently not content with lyricism, attempting to engage the reader’s head as well as heart, and taking evident pleasure in poetry as a mental game.
Astronaut displayed this playful quality in abundance, and though it is still in evidence in Graft, much of the new collection has a darker, less happy quality, reflected in the dour title. This is particularly strong in some of the erotic poems, where the mind-games can turn nasty. Such as the title poem, which begins:
The woman pinching her nipples
with increasing force
does not practice for her lover’s bite
whatever her lover whispers
to himself in bed with himself.
The tone is set by the solitary act, the separate lovers, and the prominence of “force” and “bite” at the end of successive lines. The second verse describes the woman as “perhaps” thinking abstract thoughts about “the crocus / pushing through the dead / matter of the yard”, before the poem corrects itself:
This, at least, is what her lover thinks
she thinks; what he fears
she thinks is another matter:
another man, a woman like her
in build and demeanour,
a stranger seen for five seconds
then, now, obliterated by her hands.
This suggests another meaning of the word “graft”, as the image of the stranger is grafted onto the woman’s sexual fantasy (in her lover’s paranoid imagination). Henry skilfully constructs an Escher-like maze of imagined perspectives through the repetition of “thinks” and the use of line breaks to reveal new avenues of thought (“what he fears / she thinks”). And of course, none of this tells us what the woman really thinks.
The closing couplet of Graft is sealed with a subtle rhyme on “seconds” / “hands”, and I personally feel it’s a shame Henry doesn’t use rhyme more often in Graft, as he did in Astronaut, because his rhymes are typically witty and effective. Like these from the villanelle Urge and Resist, telling another story of erotic attraction and fear: “mired”, “marred”, “fingered”, “answered”, “disregard”, “feared”, “unhindered”. Urge and Resist is also remarkable for the eccentric refrain “Nor did I pause to ask, though I paused unhindered” – which looks pretty unpromising out of context, but Henry somehow carries it off.
“Graft” could also refer to different styles being grafted together, and there is an impressive range of styles and registers in the book, not all of which are difficult. Look Around starts as a disarmingly simple monologue by a slightly geeky narrator, watching a woman arranging flowers at the window opposite. It contains flashes of gentle humour, explicitly rejecting the temptation of a conventionally ‘poetic’ style:
I once thought she smiled at me as I typed.
I return the smile in to the darkness
but I refuse to say the darkness smiled back.
The darkness was not even that dark.
As the poem progresses, more unsettling implications of the speaker’s voyeurism start to emerge with his weird trains of thought:
I have seen no demons in her apartment.
No demons have entered or left during my vigil.
But a demon arriving before I began
could be there still, awander in her rooms
and wanting to ask about the flowers but afraid
to ask would risk a warmth.
This imaginary demon could be the presiding spirit of Graft: entering through the doorway of negation (“no demons”) and wandering freely through imagined spaces, it has a slightly naïve, childlike quality, as well as more disturbing potential.
Although I found some of Graft’s intellectual games a little abstract, the collection as a whole makes a lot of other poetry seem rather tame. After reading it, I felt as though I had been stretched in an unusual direction and hadn’t quite come back to where I began. And there are moments where Henry achieves a fine balance between intellectual dexterity and deeply felt emotion, to stunning effect. Like the closing lines of this poem, another with the title This Blueness Not All Blue:
The point where you asked me inside, as I was,
perpendicular beneath the skylight that offered a
view
of more dead suns than anyone could count.
As the number of times you asked me inside you
that night,
that week, are more than anyone could count.
Here the lyric beauty is heightened by scientific conjecture about the number of “dead suns” in the night sky, and can accommodate the geometrical term “perpendicular”. The effect is similar to that of Louis MacNeice’s Star-gazer, in which the speaker think of the awesome distances travelled by the light from the stars and ends up running “from side to side in a late night train / Admiring it and adding noughts in vain”. Like MacNeice, Henry uses arithmetic to link the human and stellar spheres, so that “the number of times” becomes not a coldly objective calculation but a multiplication of wonder.
While Henry succeeds through verbal elaboration and excess, Maggie Sawkins makes a virtue of a deliberately pared-down style. Her pamphlet Charcot’s Pet opens with a wonderfully economical
three-line stanza that sets the tone for the collection:
I have come to translate the silence.
I’ve brought paper and pencils
and a pair of small ears.
Here is a poetic manifesto, originally published in Magma 24, at once ambitious and minimalist. The act of writing is reduced to the bare essentials: intention, paper and pencils – and the surprise of that
pair of small ears. The image is charming, exact and somehow convincing. The poet’s words place the ears before us as clearly as a pair of slippers on the carpet:
First I will unwrap the ears
and place them face up
on the floor.
You will observe their strangeness
these tiny shallows
their bridges of bone.
The ears, which are “waiting for the sound / of no sound”, suggest that the act of listening is at least as important as the act of writing – like an art teacher telling you to spend more time looking than drawing, or a Zen master telling his pupils to meditate not on the teacup but the space around the teacup. Throughout Charcot’s Pet what is left out or unspoken – “the silence” – is as important as what is included. Several poems hint at family dramas without describing them in detail. Thus Pink Salmon begins with a passing mention of a
father’s “manic phase”, and in The Blue Violinist the image of “My son” floating “above our town / on a blue-painted chair” is evidently a metaphor for a loss or tragedy that is not made explicit. Ever After
is a happily-ever-after poem that speaks volumes about the unmentioned unhappiness that has gone before. Other absences we encounter in the collection include silences, secrets, “an anger / that
does not tell”, “absence of light”, poems titled In His Absence and Elimination, and a voice that “disappeared / like a rabbit up a sleeve”. The cumulative impression is of spaciousness and possibility as well as loss, so that the poems come to seem much larger than they look at first sight.
To aim for simplicity is to risk banality, and the short, almost meagre stanzas that predominate in Charcot’s Pet leave little room for error, as individual words are more prominent than they would be in denser blocks of text. So it is remarkable how often a single word stands out as surprising but somehow perfectly chosen. Like the word “shuffle” in this stanza from A Pair of Small Ears, condensing the shuffling gait of a tramp with the shooing motion of someone moving on the “vagrant”:
You must soften your breath
learn patience –
shuffle along any vagrant thought.
Or the delicate chime of “tinsel” at the beginning of Cinders:
The clink of the door.
The last tinsel of laughter.
I am left at the hearth.
Or how about the concentrated malice of “pixilated” in this description of a “rogue gene”:
When they found it
it didn’t look like her at all.
It had my father’s pixilated eyes,
his darkened stare. (Rogue Gene)
Here Sawkins brings to life what Ted Hughes calls ‘the goblin in a word’. In The Zoo Keeper’s Song she does the opposite, creating a riddle by leaving out a key word – the name of the species being
described – and building up a picture of the animals through glimpses and metaphors:
I enter the enclosure
run my hand over
the primitive patchwork skin
watch how they flutter their eyelashes
like two actresses
in an old time movie.
If you haven’t guessed it yet, I won’t spoil the riddle – the poem is well worth reading in its entirety.
Unlike the zoo keeper’s charges, or Flaubert’s Parrot, Charcot’s ‘Pet’ turns out to be human. As Sawkins explains in a footnote to the title poem: “Jean-Martin Charcot, the first of the great European theorists of hysteria, frequently staged ‘shows’ to the members of his neurological service at the Saltpêtrière Hospital. Blanche Wittman, Charcot’s pet hysteric, was one of the main attractions.”
Charcot was an extremely authoritarian figure who has been accused of treating his patients with contempt. His peculiar method of diagnosis was to have patients stripped naked in a room with black
walls and furniture, and to stare at them in silence until he formed an opinion of their condition. His domineering personality is vividly evoked in the poem Charcot’s Pet:
The doctor is a kind man:
he keeps me warm,
he feeds me seed cake
and assam tea.
But sometimes he makes me crawl.
Pick up the crumbs
my little goose.
Although I find it hard to square the poem’s purely submissive image of Blanche with other accounts – of a bossy, capricious woman who was nicknamed ‘the queen of the hysterics’ – the poem, like the
collection, succeeds beautifully on its own terms. At 39 pages Charcot’s Pet is a short collection, but the overall effect is of a kind of poetic Tardis – much bigger on the inside than the outside – and it will hopefully not be long before this talented writer outgrows the pamphlet form.
Page(s) 60-63
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