Olivia Cole reviews In Defence of Adultery by Julia Copus (Bloodaxe £7.95).
The provocative title of Julia Copus's second collection teasingly both encapsulates and deflects from its contents. In Defence of Adultery promises private narrative and admits in its final poem to the enmeshing of “lovers, houses, landscapes” in the “cages” of poems. However this defence is far more metaphysical in its focus than straightforwardly emotional or erotic. In a philosophical consideration of the way a poet or lover looks and hears, Copus makes a powerful case for our rights to stray not in our actions but in the way in which, as artists and people, we remember and recount experience.
Efforts at fidelity of representation lead to a lyrically engaging appropriation of the precision of science. The book’s first epigraph from Lewis Carroll aka Maths don Charles Dodgson – the Cheshire Cat’s apt insistence that “it doesn’t much matter which way you go” – is cast into doubt by MacNeice’s poem Entirely which, somewhat if not entirely, reconciles its speaker to suffering:
And if the world were black and white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go …
Reality is eluded in prismatic poems that use the ‘black and white’ of print to relocate both speaker and reader in landscapes that, like Alice, we both do and do not know.
A more moderate response to roads taken than her first collection, The Shuttered Eye, the voice retains its control and force, if in a quieter calmer pitch. In the final poem of that collection, The Art of Interpretation, Copus paused the action with commands to an imagined reader, critic or biographer to beware of the artfulness of even the most seemingly casually left study:
A plain wood table, the obligatory
vase of flowers, the writer’s head bent low
over his work. At the far end, a window.
Open. Apart from this there is little
to help us with the story: the room is left
deliberately bare, inviting us
to speculate. Consider, for instance,
the window as an eye. Is it looking out
or looking in?
Desk, room and life are arranged by the poet who adds the “background noise” and “volume controls”, to reimagine the scene as one filmed. The eye carries on “looking” and the dial here invoked is ever more finely tuned; seeing and hearing, and understanding those processes has become for Copus a visionary tool for looking “out” and “in”. Her investigations, most profoundly in Lamb’s Electronic Antibiotic and the impressive sequence Playing it by Ear, consistently emerge with emotional revelations from the technical details of sensory perception.
“Light rain” composes “the lake it falls into” (Love, Like Water) – the speaker sees the rain falling as an artistic controlled composition. If our lives remain beyond such artful control and subject to love, an uncompromising “autocrat” (In Defence of Adultery), power can be reasserted in the way we choose to remember or recount the chaos. A Short History of Desire, like the title poem's “defence”, offers a pseudoacademic harness on a run-away theme. The narrative flicks through images of the erotic from chivalrous knights “in pursuit of some noble / improbable task,” to repressed Victorian men transfixed by illicit glimpses of ankles, to the liberal free fall of today. Cupid’s arrow is a ray of light, a slice of flesh and finally a slither of moon. The mercurial images dramatise the conviction that even with a whole cultural heritage of clichés at one's revivifying fingertips, love challenges all that can be caged in a “history”, a “defence” or we might infer a poem. On any given “day like today”, however “deep asleep you think you are,” the heightened pitch of an erotic charge can re-arrange the landscape. Desire, with “the fervour of light” speeds across time:
the way in the Fifties it glanced off the fenders
of a thousand parked up Morris Minors
under the moon when the sweetest of girls
might take off her clothes on a day like today
to the radio’s chanting …
Pray, the speaker implores, that “when it does… your heart, out cold / for the winter, stirs”. in its pile of selfreferential writer’s “leaves”. Be, we are urged, caught “off guard by the quickening / thump of your hoof-beat heart returning / from very far off”.
The trajectory reaches for the moon, beyond grasp, “afloat” and trembling with “longing”. Throughout In Defence of Adultery it is precisely such distant energies that are so effectively harnessed. The scientific bias of the collection both develops into an emotional language and colonises some unmapped, unused visual territory. Such a strategy allows the imagination to play with the colourless textbook titles of the tiny miracles that, if we attune ourselves, replace prosaic familiarity with a heightened awareness. In Home Physics the lessons are learnt by both writer and reader:
Heat and Matter: dry cleaner bag rises to ceiling; wire sieve boat
floats on water till alcohol is added; film loop: Irreversibility and
Fluctuations (silent, 7 mins). Optics: standard colour blindness
tests,
box of coloured yarns; phantom bouquet: real image from
a concave mirror; horn thermophile and mirror sense candle across
room. Astronomy and Perception: vault of the heavens: large
lucite globe.
An intimacy is consistently revealed between the heart and the head. “Forgiveness” depends on the use of the word in physics; the notes to the poem reveal our thoughtlessly used word as “a collective term for impact resistance, fracture toughness, fatigue-crack growth rate, etc.” Such analogies offer a playful enjoyment of the detachability of language and conventional meaning. However, more significantly they sustain a profound sense of human fragility. For a grieving man on the edge of the sea, “Only the waves remained: dumb, emphatic, / arching and falling in the fibrous light, just arching and falling into themselves / the way a ball describes itself in flight” (Out).
Visual, verbal and technological aids to accuracy unite the lover who would remember and the poet who would tell. The two guises meet resonantly in Breaking the Rule, recently announced as winner of this year’s National Poetry Competition. With delicate humanity the camera of the poet’s eye invades another artist’s space. The quiet life and work of a medieval craftsman emerges with a delicate humanity and resonance, “the evening sun / gilding the abbey tower, the cold brook // sliding past and every hour in my Book / a blank page, vellum pumiced // to a lustre”. In Forgiveness we are reminded of how
some of us buckle
under the smallest
slight, while others acquire
a lustre, like the sheer
gleam of a pearl …
Copus's vision of the illuminator shows the countering of loss with the comparatively solid, or to use the terms of her elegy for Plath, (Courage), “attainable” medium of art. The poet’s words and sounds are the “saffron and sandarach and dragon’s blood, / azure and verdigris” of inks, and
Every face
takes on the features of a face I’ve known
and every angel’s face beneath the shadow
of its many-coloured wings is hers alone.
Assured, possessed of that “lustre” alluded to in the shattering of glass and hearts, these are poems that reward the close listening and looking on which they themselves depend.
Efforts at fidelity of representation lead to a lyrically engaging appropriation of the precision of science. The book’s first epigraph from Lewis Carroll aka Maths don Charles Dodgson – the Cheshire Cat’s apt insistence that “it doesn’t much matter which way you go” – is cast into doubt by MacNeice’s poem Entirely which, somewhat if not entirely, reconciles its speaker to suffering:
And if the world were black and white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go …
Reality is eluded in prismatic poems that use the ‘black and white’ of print to relocate both speaker and reader in landscapes that, like Alice, we both do and do not know.
A more moderate response to roads taken than her first collection, The Shuttered Eye, the voice retains its control and force, if in a quieter calmer pitch. In the final poem of that collection, The Art of Interpretation, Copus paused the action with commands to an imagined reader, critic or biographer to beware of the artfulness of even the most seemingly casually left study:
A plain wood table, the obligatory
vase of flowers, the writer’s head bent low
over his work. At the far end, a window.
Open. Apart from this there is little
to help us with the story: the room is left
deliberately bare, inviting us
to speculate. Consider, for instance,
the window as an eye. Is it looking out
or looking in?
Desk, room and life are arranged by the poet who adds the “background noise” and “volume controls”, to reimagine the scene as one filmed. The eye carries on “looking” and the dial here invoked is ever more finely tuned; seeing and hearing, and understanding those processes has become for Copus a visionary tool for looking “out” and “in”. Her investigations, most profoundly in Lamb’s Electronic Antibiotic and the impressive sequence Playing it by Ear, consistently emerge with emotional revelations from the technical details of sensory perception.
“Light rain” composes “the lake it falls into” (Love, Like Water) – the speaker sees the rain falling as an artistic controlled composition. If our lives remain beyond such artful control and subject to love, an uncompromising “autocrat” (In Defence of Adultery), power can be reasserted in the way we choose to remember or recount the chaos. A Short History of Desire, like the title poem's “defence”, offers a pseudoacademic harness on a run-away theme. The narrative flicks through images of the erotic from chivalrous knights “in pursuit of some noble / improbable task,” to repressed Victorian men transfixed by illicit glimpses of ankles, to the liberal free fall of today. Cupid’s arrow is a ray of light, a slice of flesh and finally a slither of moon. The mercurial images dramatise the conviction that even with a whole cultural heritage of clichés at one's revivifying fingertips, love challenges all that can be caged in a “history”, a “defence” or we might infer a poem. On any given “day like today”, however “deep asleep you think you are,” the heightened pitch of an erotic charge can re-arrange the landscape. Desire, with “the fervour of light” speeds across time:
the way in the Fifties it glanced off the fenders
of a thousand parked up Morris Minors
under the moon when the sweetest of girls
might take off her clothes on a day like today
to the radio’s chanting …
Pray, the speaker implores, that “when it does… your heart, out cold / for the winter, stirs”. in its pile of selfreferential writer’s “leaves”. Be, we are urged, caught “off guard by the quickening / thump of your hoof-beat heart returning / from very far off”.
The trajectory reaches for the moon, beyond grasp, “afloat” and trembling with “longing”. Throughout In Defence of Adultery it is precisely such distant energies that are so effectively harnessed. The scientific bias of the collection both develops into an emotional language and colonises some unmapped, unused visual territory. Such a strategy allows the imagination to play with the colourless textbook titles of the tiny miracles that, if we attune ourselves, replace prosaic familiarity with a heightened awareness. In Home Physics the lessons are learnt by both writer and reader:
Heat and Matter: dry cleaner bag rises to ceiling; wire sieve boat
floats on water till alcohol is added; film loop: Irreversibility and
Fluctuations (silent, 7 mins). Optics: standard colour blindness
tests,
box of coloured yarns; phantom bouquet: real image from
a concave mirror; horn thermophile and mirror sense candle across
room. Astronomy and Perception: vault of the heavens: large
lucite globe.
An intimacy is consistently revealed between the heart and the head. “Forgiveness” depends on the use of the word in physics; the notes to the poem reveal our thoughtlessly used word as “a collective term for impact resistance, fracture toughness, fatigue-crack growth rate, etc.” Such analogies offer a playful enjoyment of the detachability of language and conventional meaning. However, more significantly they sustain a profound sense of human fragility. For a grieving man on the edge of the sea, “Only the waves remained: dumb, emphatic, / arching and falling in the fibrous light, just arching and falling into themselves / the way a ball describes itself in flight” (Out).
Visual, verbal and technological aids to accuracy unite the lover who would remember and the poet who would tell. The two guises meet resonantly in Breaking the Rule, recently announced as winner of this year’s National Poetry Competition. With delicate humanity the camera of the poet’s eye invades another artist’s space. The quiet life and work of a medieval craftsman emerges with a delicate humanity and resonance, “the evening sun / gilding the abbey tower, the cold brook // sliding past and every hour in my Book / a blank page, vellum pumiced // to a lustre”. In Forgiveness we are reminded of how
some of us buckle
under the smallest
slight, while others acquire
a lustre, like the sheer
gleam of a pearl …
Copus's vision of the illuminator shows the countering of loss with the comparatively solid, or to use the terms of her elegy for Plath, (Courage), “attainable” medium of art. The poet’s words and sounds are the “saffron and sandarach and dragon’s blood, / azure and verdigris” of inks, and
Every face
takes on the features of a face I’ve known
and every angel’s face beneath the shadow
of its many-coloured wings is hers alone.
Assured, possessed of that “lustre” alluded to in the shattering of glass and hearts, these are poems that reward the close listening and looking on which they themselves depend.
Page(s) 54-57
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