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A Voiced Awakening by David Jaffin
(2004, ISBN 0-907562-57-4, Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter EX4 4LD, 214pp, no price given)

An even more difficult book to review: nearly 500 short and highly-fragmented poems, often with words split over lines. This is presumably to slow the reader down and draw attention to underlying verbal structures; it requires the poems to be puzzled over at the word or syllable level. At first, I thought the effect was (groan) Haiku like, but the more I slowed down, the better the poems became. Sometimes the technique produces striking results:

     “Saddam’s palaces

     gleamed in
     the gold of

     his sun-
     set smiles

     And the dark
     of those tor-

     ture chamber’
     s deep in the

     depth of his
     unfathomed

     will for power
     in ruins now

     Classically-
     cat-oriented

     that ancient
     culture robbed

     of the ar
     tifacts of

     what’s past

     passed.”

I love the simple “unfathomed” at the centre of the poem, and the “cat-oriented”, evoking a sphinx. The word splitting also produces a brilliantly chilling effect with “his sun-/set smiles” – all those pictures of Saddam’s clones grinning sycophantically at long tables, with him at the top. And somehow it also seems the right approach morally, both standing in awe of the enormity and attempting to get inside the verbal response.

My problem with the method is when it produces something like this, where the word splitting seems pointless – maybe because the thought expressed is also a bit trite:

     “Making person

     If

     Making mon
     ey’s making

     person Why
     haven’t we ac

     quired a pa
     pered face
 
     then.”

A positive aspect of the approach, certainly in comparison with Imagism, is the impetus and movement that the lineation gives, so that the poems are all readable, despite at first appearing quite off-putting. Funnily enough, and this will outrage the poet but who cares, I was reminded of reading some Bukowski poems, where he achieves very compelling effects by a similar technique (although not at the word level).

   This is obviously not a book which can be read other than by dipping; the poems don’t work for me if taken in large numbers. Another interesting thing is that the poet is clearly a religious man, with a spiritual dimension underlying the work, but this aspect can both be ignored and acknowledged without it affecting how one responds to the poems. Again, this seems an interesting example of how the form has a moral dimension to it.

   In summary, I’d certainly recommend the book as something different and refreshing. It’s a useful book to read, it forces one’s attention onto the language, but not in the rather painful way that some L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry does.