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Textual Possessions by Peter Philpott
131pp, £9.95, Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter,
EX4 4LD, ISBN 0-907562-53-1

This collection is three long sequences of poems, all of which contain passages of real power and beauty:

   "In the hill under the earth and on it
   And beside and in the water
   Paths leading to the West
   Leached and fading, never lost
   A libidinal sheen and play
   Of shadows of embarrassment and excitation
   Each moment a childhood
   Or a wave, sighing"

                                (An imagined land without hills and water).

   Especially good is the unforced mingling of landscape and personal mythology:

   "The blue haze of unknowing
   Loses the quiet towns of art and love
   Where old men wander gently

   The blue haze drops around
   Like a cocky jacket, armouring
   The heart itself

   The haze hangs beyond everything seen
   Soaking up light into a dull radiance
   Milky and senile

   It beds us in
   No shift
   The blue haze
   No knowing"
    
 (from In the Present Historic Sense: A Serial Poem of the West).

   The setting is the Somerset coast; its vast tidal ranges, etched mud flats and the enveloping blue from the Levels behind.

   Sometimes, reading these as sequences and judging their cumulative effect, I did get bored. That unmentionable word, which is the risk with some experimental writing, if one's honest and not cowed by theoretical justifications. That's almost a stroppy teenager's response, so I'll try and elaborate.

   I'd make a comparison with Roy Fisher, specifically with his late work, "A Furnace". It's constructed from long sequences, interwoven by a double helical structure; attempting a synthesis from personal, historical and (mostly industrial) landscapes. So it sounds daunting. And Fisher's work is difficult, tentative and grappling its way forward, albeit with a clear center. But I think the reader enjoys this, you feel Fisher is genuinely unsure and wants you in on the questioning. Whereas Philpott's writing can lack that tug, with some of the questioning seeming a bit staged:

   "Like the children stuck
   In some colossal stupid game
   Blindly on into the night
   Rushing out and in:
                                       it's
   Three o'clock, it's nearly midnight
   And I am 43 or 4
   Here. Why?"

                                                                       (New Year Poem).

   Later sections more actively mix questioning, statement, and then worries about the limits of language – a repeated theme in this sort of writing, and (crudely) what it's largely "about". There are affirmative nods to Olson, Pound, WIlliams and Frank O'Hara, but the resemblance that struck me was to Eliot's Ash Wednesday, or parts of The Four Quartets. There's a striving for some overarching authority, to reconcile the disparate elements.

   In one sense, I worry how genuine this reconciliation can be - is it stumbled upon or willed? But if it produces something as breathtaking as this, it doesn't matter:

   "light
   & clarity
   I'm sorry, I love
   just at a distance
   this
       bursting watery or golden
   irradiating some dumb viewer
   into gratified desire"

                                                                            (Just the Same).