Control & Transgression: walls you can walk through
Trevor Joyce Review
With the First Dream of Fire they Hunt the Cold Trevor Joyce (New Writers' Press & Shearsman Books, 15.5 x 19.5cm/perfect bound, 243pp/£12.95).
Republic of Ireland: New Writers' Press, 61 Clarence Mangan Road, South Circular Road, Dublin 8, Ireland
www.ireland-alive.com/nwp
UK: Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter, EX4 4LD
www.shearsman.co.uk
"The degree to which our desire to possess beauty leads us to imitate its image rather than its processes… makes experience of beauty harder to come by within the fluid circumstances of everyday life…"
Trevor Joyce1
1 Dreaming the Fire
Subtitled 'A Body of Work 1966/2000', this is more than just another interesting poetry book from Shearsman and some of its poetry friends. The information detailed above shows it to be a landmark too. It is monumental in that it marks the refounding of New Writers' Press and it is a corrective to the critical unwriting of neo-modernist poetry from Ireland. It is also an introduction to a body of work that in its modernity might link us to the past, both in terms of atavistic tradition - and how we might defuse or humanise that - and in terms of the history of modernism. This book could be an ironic triumphal arch, something to celebrate or emphasise the lost cause of high modernism, or material evidence of the idea of the past and the present as (to quote Spender) 'a whole fatality'.
Everything gets to be questioned, including the processes of perceiving, remembering and creating a life or a poetry. Subjectivity and objectivity are interconnected but exist as apparently closed loops.
Cul-de-sac words. parables: fraud.
how to come to terms?
from Death is Conventional
What is within both realms is open to speculation. How language relates to either and how it might be opening or closing the loops is part of the matter of this poetry. Language and the fallacies of language - the theme parks of transcendentalism or romanticism or social realism - these things are presented within a context that makes life uneasy for assumptions, cop-outs or tribal projections. Such a treatment makes it hard for the poems to become consumer products. Joyce looks warily through the net cast by his writing - through the poems as systems and through notions of data management - at a world enclosed by the concepts of product and choice. The market place reaches into the poetry:
we have data bases that are continuously updated and parsed
a suddenly familiar landscape is revealed
when in a single stroke lightning opens
to yield in an unprecedented level of detail
your range of choice by these
multiplied beyond your wildest dreams
the universe
from Data Shadows, II
Data Shadows does not replicate the mathematical basis of an automated computer system, but it does - in its form - mimic it. Throughout the poem phrases are repeated according to an actual or implied pattern and the clichés are those of the contemporary workplace (the thrill of 'drilling down', the control of data, a sense of supervision, the Pentium powered voyeur with a spectre at his/her fingertips). The grandeur of nature is placed in this context - the single stroke of lightning could be a metaphor for a keystroke (the one that commands data, that drills down). The speaker is showing us around a system that contains everything, leaving us apparently free from labour to consume our choice, our self and a state of alienation that has become universal. Technical language shares its podium with advertising jargon. There are straplines embedded in this discourse, corrupting it. They remind us how we gave up what was ours so we could chose to buy it back. The power relationship is not equal and the arrangement is not clouded by justice, which doesn't get a look in. This is where we are now. The acts of enclosure are all but completed.
The poet - himself a liberator and encloser - has avoided redundancy by enacting a commentary. Joyce describes his own sense of nullity, not to manipulate our sympathy but to argue on behalf of the merely human in the face of systems - which means not just technologies and economies, but beliefs and social systems and poetries too - that might remove the essence of being human, or the experience that is mysterious, unsold or unchosen. Worldly concerns and aesthetic concerns - the social and the poetic, the historical and the archetypal - are part of a dialectic. The enquiry is a rational one you can examine over time. And Joyce has a subtle style, which is fitting for one concerned with the corruption of language, or the simplification of discourse. He seems to view his own language usage with suspicion and if you come to this work to consume it he makes you start again.
2 Hunting the Cold
"The body of work collected here spans over thirty years, making available in a single volume the entire range of his diverse poetic output." It begins with The Poems of Sweeny, Peregrine: A Working of the Corrupt Irish Text (1966-76). In this poem the lyrical voice itself is examined, along with the efficacy of the story of the pagan Irish King who was cursed by St. Ronan for the murder of a psalmist. "Deranged and rattled as a wild bird, Sweeny began his wanderings." The poem interrogates the lyric voice and questions assumptions about the nature of such ontological mechanisms as may or may not underpin the expression of the self and the self itself and whether or not such a thing can correspond with the world outside - "ice and wood / have thrown up palisades against me" - it is an ironic sketch of the state of the poet. How to connect? And with what? And to what does a poem refer?
Joyce seeks a way into and through the dilemma of the modern. How to make a connection between the present and the past, the inner and the outer, without falling prey to illusions of authenticity, belonging or rootedness? The past is like a stone wall the present is scratched on, or the present object is the baffled monument we get glimpses of the past through. Bewildered, we inhabit a surreal world divided and defined by customs if not laws.
Behind is a wall in which there is no door
But you have opened it
And gone through
from The Opening
The transgressor has left the building, perhaps leaving the poet to work away on his own language project in which he examines diction in terms of its fitness for use and its unavoidable (and perhaps humanising or socialising) corruption.
Joyce's Sweeny speaks from the far side of a corrupt text, he exhausts his own lyric voice, he repents. But every story is suspect, including the ones we tell ourselves. Time corrupts language, and authority does it too and within the mad complexity of how language works we are left trying to forge our own selves from dodgy narratives. No wonder selfhood is such a slighted thing, consumerism such an overwhelming force. We don't stand a chance, but Joyce looks to poetry as a ground within which to reconstruct traditions. This can sometimes be done using novel forms and page layouts.
Trem Neul (1999) got me excited. The page is divided, like the right and left sides of the brain or - more likely - one of those walls without doors that some people can open. There are 46 pages similar to the one quoted below:
Observe what follows on the destruc
-tion of soft life and the boundless
mystery of the content of softness:
shorn of that connective tissue which
gave them meaning, assertions
thinned to noise, promises proved
empty, threats were ignored, warn-
ings unheeded, and none of your ques-
tions could be answered. Though
surface of your voice exhale presence,
it was just the same as confronting a
broken stem with sap flowing out,
provoked by an inexplicable inner
process, a force only apparently un-
derstood. But never mind all this.
What drew my notice was those
rooms filled with a great number of
foreign fowls, preserved in their
lively and beautiful colours, whose
brilliant appearances, freedom, in
their plumage, and animated atti-
tudes, seem as natural in this lifeless
state, as if they still breathed.
He will probably carry
that box
They are probably selling
meat
in the market
I think he has agreed
to build
a cook's house
for me
Let me go
and see
if they will bring
an axe to cut
these trees
with
Those are very un-Yeatsian birds, being neither gods nor made of gold. They might be dead in the poem - and how else could they be in such circumstances - but Joyce allows them the luxury of breath in the world beyond it, logic demands it. But the nod in the direction of a Yeatsian image from 'the timeless realm of art' indicates another conflict in Joyce's writing, it shows up in the split between the phenomenological world and aestheticism. It is an ironic tension and a likely source of the word-play - the poet in one sense mocks the activities of the poet in another - and such a 'split' is itself a product of language.
The division of the page is significant, duality is enabling of new perspectives in the exploration of poetry in the world. In the page quoted, the text on the left seems to refer to the construction of a poem. Up to 'But never mind all this' describes how a poem comes into being, not through a transcendental/ inspirational mystery, but from the matter of memories that are already inside the body. Writing is a physical act. After this pivotal phrase, the text refers to the dead but still gaudy matter of the poem. The metaphors that will engross us. The text on the right is the text of the world, that which is outside of poetry and the poet's head. It is about work and meat and trade. 'He' has a number of things to do, the economy and the speaker demand it. Whether these two texts are complimentary or in competition is unstated, but they do correspond. The poem oozes; he works. You can embody a poem like this but you cannot enclose it. In terms of meaning, it is complex, it offers more possibilities than a simple gloss can deal with.
Somewhere in the material accompanying this book I read of how Ireland has bypassed industrial revolution and headed straight down the information superhighway. Rapid economic growth creates its own anxieties and these have provoked a recontextualising - or reinvention - of national stereotypes, the romantic past that is as much a product of British and American imperialism as of Irishness. A dolmen. A computer. The stone flood of information and the ways in which that also corrupts what it engulfs and the presence of the mass media within contemporary reality - adverts and the absolutes and utopias they sell - these are present tensions, blocks and absences in the work of Trevor Joyce. You don't get medicated when you read this, instead you get the healthy alternative to treatment. You might not become unbewildered, but you might find bewilderment to be the first step towards a complexity you might embrace. No easy star or narrative to steer by then, but beautiful complex stars, a patient exploration and the working of a field - a testing, breaking and remaking - and a ludic send-up and honouring of the bounds we must be enclosed by, that we must break, and how poetry and the present and the past might help us or hinder us in this. That's the kind of thing I get when I read this book (and it is a beautifully designed object too, the graphic designer has done a quality job).
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The