Taking notes: review
Adversaria by Peter Dent
Adversaria by Peter Dent, 48pp, £5.95, Stride, 11 Sylvan Rd, Exeter, Devon, EX4 6EW
I love the square, compact format of Stride’s recent publications. The reason? It feels as though I have opened a drawer and discovered someone’s secret diary. As though I can take it away in my pocket and read it anywhere: on a train, in a café, under a tree. It reminds me of how it felt to have a book as a child, the materiality of the thing. It links me to its writer like a lost notebook. Nothing is more fitting for Peter Dent’s Adversaria: his message in a bottle, his notebook of sensation and impression. Its immediacy makes you worry about smudging the ink.
The reader takes part in these poems which seem to capture phrases as they rush past, setting them down for contemplation. Though they sometimes jostle, Dent arranges them with the meticulous care of a butterfly collector.
In ‘Winter Palaces’ the declarations of emotion sit easily with quirky observation:
Delight in spectacles I must I suppose
Deliberate on bloodfests at other times.
If hatred playing a dab hand raw to
The blade so an emperor speaks for all.
Lines like these are sly and full of panache; the language lives, though its many lives are hard to conceptualise. You have to decide whether this is for you or not. In some senses, these pieces are works-in-progress. We are watching the writing form. Sometimes it is self-reflexive, musing on its own construction as it is in ‘Steady State’:
…with the verb
To will and stuff its dazzling this
Dabbling…
You can’t always be sure if these words are those captured butterflies or comments from the butterfly-catcher himself. In some ways, I like the exhilaration; in others, the difficulty in situating myself as a reader, makes me feel alienated. Are these poems for me, or simply for themselves? A little like being at a party, wondering if you were invited.
Another piece that made an impression was undisguisedly concerned with the ‘issue’ of writing, of poetic thinking. In ‘Autumn Issue’, the sense of discussion: ‘Was it some poets gave you their time/And a very strange place it was’, is how it begins. This brings into relief the strange transformation time undergoes in the writing that attempts to capture it. The speech at the centre of the poem, ‘ ‘Who cares’ she asks ‘if anyone guesses’, brings us in, implicating us in the debate in a way that makes the ‘found’ nature of some of the poem’s language gather around this speech. I’d love it if Dent did a little more of this in his work, giving a pin of a phrase around which the energy of some of his more ungrounded language might spin.
There are some beautiful images, delighting in the weight and flavour of the words themselves as much as in what they may evoke. In ‘Accretion’, ‘Woods fall to the alluvial bed’. In ‘Necessary Mode’, ‘The shadowy steps down which an answer/steals.’
Though not overtly Eastern, these poems are arranged for contemplation; they are of uniform length, the book arranged in a precise manner, like a Japanese garden. There is a constant sensation that moments in time have been captured, with all that may land in the net of this writer: the complexity of conversation and interaction, the simplicity of a natural object, the energy of a movement. In ‘Sycamore Stand’:
I speak of it tilts any absent-minded gaze
To work on overtime on a vagrant leaf ’s
Return to nothing an idling in the wings
Like landscape lost would I have seen it?
Haunting us with a question about the very perception being set down.
There is something scientific about this book, like the jottings of an observer whose laboratory consists of his own thoughts and the passing images and sensations of his environment. I see the extra spaces he includes in the line as gaps in his assemblage that the reader might enter, peek through and watch, as the poems fragment
and shape themselves again.
I love the square, compact format of Stride’s recent publications. The reason? It feels as though I have opened a drawer and discovered someone’s secret diary. As though I can take it away in my pocket and read it anywhere: on a train, in a café, under a tree. It reminds me of how it felt to have a book as a child, the materiality of the thing. It links me to its writer like a lost notebook. Nothing is more fitting for Peter Dent’s Adversaria: his message in a bottle, his notebook of sensation and impression. Its immediacy makes you worry about smudging the ink.
The reader takes part in these poems which seem to capture phrases as they rush past, setting them down for contemplation. Though they sometimes jostle, Dent arranges them with the meticulous care of a butterfly collector.
In ‘Winter Palaces’ the declarations of emotion sit easily with quirky observation:
Delight in spectacles I must I suppose
Deliberate on bloodfests at other times.
If hatred playing a dab hand raw to
The blade so an emperor speaks for all.
Lines like these are sly and full of panache; the language lives, though its many lives are hard to conceptualise. You have to decide whether this is for you or not. In some senses, these pieces are works-in-progress. We are watching the writing form. Sometimes it is self-reflexive, musing on its own construction as it is in ‘Steady State’:
…with the verb
To will and stuff its dazzling this
Dabbling…
You can’t always be sure if these words are those captured butterflies or comments from the butterfly-catcher himself. In some ways, I like the exhilaration; in others, the difficulty in situating myself as a reader, makes me feel alienated. Are these poems for me, or simply for themselves? A little like being at a party, wondering if you were invited.
Another piece that made an impression was undisguisedly concerned with the ‘issue’ of writing, of poetic thinking. In ‘Autumn Issue’, the sense of discussion: ‘Was it some poets gave you their time/And a very strange place it was’, is how it begins. This brings into relief the strange transformation time undergoes in the writing that attempts to capture it. The speech at the centre of the poem, ‘ ‘Who cares’ she asks ‘if anyone guesses’, brings us in, implicating us in the debate in a way that makes the ‘found’ nature of some of the poem’s language gather around this speech. I’d love it if Dent did a little more of this in his work, giving a pin of a phrase around which the energy of some of his more ungrounded language might spin.
There are some beautiful images, delighting in the weight and flavour of the words themselves as much as in what they may evoke. In ‘Accretion’, ‘Woods fall to the alluvial bed’. In ‘Necessary Mode’, ‘The shadowy steps down which an answer/steals.’
Though not overtly Eastern, these poems are arranged for contemplation; they are of uniform length, the book arranged in a precise manner, like a Japanese garden. There is a constant sensation that moments in time have been captured, with all that may land in the net of this writer: the complexity of conversation and interaction, the simplicity of a natural object, the energy of a movement. In ‘Sycamore Stand’:
I speak of it tilts any absent-minded gaze
To work on overtime on a vagrant leaf ’s
Return to nothing an idling in the wings
Like landscape lost would I have seen it?
Haunting us with a question about the very perception being set down.
There is something scientific about this book, like the jottings of an observer whose laboratory consists of his own thoughts and the passing images and sensations of his environment. I see the extra spaces he includes in the line as gaps in his assemblage that the reader might enter, peek through and watch, as the poems fragment
and shape themselves again.
Page(s) 43-45
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