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"The Fossil-Box" by Richard Marggrad Turley
Cinnamon Press £7.99

In his first collection, Richard Marggraf Turley works through the most affective confessionality in the most refreshing of form. Just like the Romantics writing on nature to covertly continue with a proliferation of radical, political ideal, here, Marggraf Turley skilfully employs nature to document the sometimes political movement of the self coming together in view of an environment; nature as language.

I come to myself 
                                                                    (Little Dean, 2)

The collection is a mine of intense introspection, the lyric ‘I’ in reconciliation with landscapes of the past: The Forest of Dean and the Ceredigion coast. The present selfhood is knitted into a Wordsworthian reexamination of the formative environment, the necessity of returning to a locus of origin, the implication of the first person singular.

Not sure where I stand.
I’ve avoided it for years.
Redshifting from the forest,
delayed by my own momentum,
a boy seeing forms and faces
in the trees, I cast my eye
up to the hanging questions
that could be bats. 
                                                                     (Blackeney, 8)

Marggraf Turley does not have experimental or deconstructive agendas, but he does highlight the uncanny tensions between the world, our perception and representation of it in language. A collection-long concentration of sight images, the use of the eye as ‘I’, performs an uncertain encounter with the world, manifest in the reflection of language and memory. The eye / I is overburdened in a rich chainmail of syntax, a stream of monosyllables. There is sensory excess in "hanging questions" and "borderless worlds", ('Stars') heterogeneous masses that the eye / I must itself be part of.

No name for the hewn scowles
we dared not enter, bare rents
of rock thatched with ferric
yew, drawn to the iron. 
                                                                      (Blackeney, 4)

The result is secular and existential; a scaling of the self into the landscape, the magnitude of the setting and its intricacies barely broken down by the eye / I, which is left to run nomadic through nature and language. Each time the eye / I is evoked, its presence is alien and alone, an itinerant metalanguage skimming the environment as sight or self.

Marggraf Turley aligns the ‘I’of the present with the diverse backdrop of natural past by way of answering his own prayer:

Give me the wisdom to wield
power over words.

His linguistic agility closes, rather than opens the gap between the self and the surrounding. Language is made malleable, breaching an almost ineffable degree of referential precision. His "Faceted eyes" acknowledge all the hidden depths in ourselves and in our world.

Afterwards, you un-
fold, sit drying
your wings, watching
the pupated world

with faceted eyes.

The musicality of the collection has attracted critical acclaim, the intensity and authenticity of the vocabulary is undeniably striking. However, the detectable connection to the Romantic sometimes stifles Marggraf Turley’s own voice; there is emphatic attachment to archaic resonances, such as "caught my fancy", and "(what) do I owe these vales?" Still, "The Fossil-box" is visually enticing, with an excellent experiment in harsh enjambment:

puzzle-                          con-                                   imp

work                              glomerate                          ression

The splitting of well chosen words extracts a pulpy centre of differential meaning, more apparent when read aloud.A well-anticipated CD version of this outstanding first collection follows shortly. Richard Marggraf Turley’s new collection, "Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair" is out later this month.