A Hoard of Marvels
Review: Pauline Stainer The Lady and the Hare: New and Selected Poems
Bloodaxe, £9.95, ISBN 1852246324
This is marvellous poetry: step right up for the on-ice spectacular of
natural magic. It offers more than a ritual staged by the visible world
for our amusement: if you blow up this dazzle, you will see the face of God. The staging is brilliant, brittle, heraldic, recherché, Anglican, glassy, attentive to phantoms, constantly projecting hysterical processes into mineral form. It moves in the stylistic space between Kathleen Raine and Brian Catling. It is preoccupied with chill, bones, minerals; is properly mortified. It belongs written on vellum, locked into a nest of lead and black velvet, inside a reliquary.
Up she rises –
the sunken softwood ship
with her dissolving
cargo of sugar,
fainter than
the eight hooves
of Sleipnir
on the albumen print
of the glacier.
Pittura metafisica
the mistletoe shafting
Baldur; Borges
feeling the pillar
in his hotel room
at Reykjavik,
the Euclid of childhood
flowing through him
like serum.
(Albumen is a kind of size used on photographic prints in the 1850s, made from egg-whites, rather like pastry glaze; the glacier too is white, flows and sets, and takes the print of Odin’s mythical horse. Baldur was shot with weapons-grade mistletoe by a blind god. Borges was blind.) As the sugar dissolves, the ship shoots to the surface – like Borges’s childhood memories. “Up she rises” is a line from a sea-shanty. The preoccupation with the Arctic, the Christian fervour, the brilliant leaps, remind one of Francis Berry, who was the “discovery” of G.Wilson Knight. The intense study of imagery in the 1930s by Knight, Caroline Spurgeon (Shakespeare’s Imagery), and Maud Bodkin probably led to this work, which is an arrangement of spiritual ideas, then a collection of objects as their analogy, then an ordering of words to trap the objects. The object choice is deep enough for its motives to be uncertain. Take this image, for example:
You would think her
cool as a flute
from the long-bone of a swan,
her flesh the lit wax
for all suppressed pallors
– strikingly repeated a few pages later as
After nine thousand years
a Chinese flute
made from the wingbone
of a red-crowned crane
is blown again
Both follow Sacheverell Sitwell’s line about the flute made from an eagle’s wing.Do the wingbones signify lacerating pain and death, or the eery prowess of the hunter, or the survival of the soul, as a sharp breath, after death? These mirabilia, marvels, are the substance of the book: rigorously uninterested in reason, realism, or preaching, it always delivers its spooky charge.
Religion likes relics, often bones, often worn and ancient, and it likes the relic words, perhaps of the bones’ owners, also fixed in binding patterns preserved by writing and reciting. In fifteenth-century Rhenish manuscript painting, the small size is connected with a larger number of people buying paintings, with lay literacy, and with privatisation. As lay literacy really gets out of hand, you get Protestantism and printing. The bourgeois household is the new authority, it wants relics small enough for portable devotions, and no priestly tutelage. Eventually, you get a privatised faith, where poetry is the office of a private mythology. Stainer is gathering objects of veneration, and forms of words to hymn them, in one.
I have serious reservations, though, about Stainer’s metrics, which seem fixed and arrested. The definition of these fragments of spoken word groups by wilful line-breaks achieves control at the cost of hobbling verse movement. There is a lack of momentum. The flavour is elusive – could we speak of a liturgical solemnity and stiff-leggedness?
On the dustjacket, admirers gush about Stainer’s scientific knowledge: but to say “The swan / entering Leda / like a laser / through alabaster” does not argue deep study of optics (or of poultry-breeding). Stainer’s world-view is completely pre-scientific, a hoard of marvels and exotica sorted by analogy. I noted “indigo, cinnabar, ice, water” as recurring images; a mixture, I think, of pigments and surfaces of high reflexivity. These optically saturated patches are either slits where the invisible shows through, or dazzles which confuse our sensory organs and expectations. In “Thomas Vaughan experiments with mercury”, we hear the sound of retort glass falling off the backs of birds after his mercury exploded, but do not hear about what he was trying to find out. Vaughan was an alchemist and Neoplatonist, a pupil of Robert Fludd – he had little enough to do with science (and was probably trying to turn the mercury into gold). The world which Frances Yates described in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment is closer to the one Stainer records: magical analogies, the virtues of precious stones, Protestant mysticism.
Stainer recalls the red ochre with which Palaeolithic Man marked burials, a symbol of blood and life – like the cinnabar which, in its guise as mercury oxide, blew up Vaughan (“heavy shining oxide / of yellow and red”). She likes burials and their assemblages of symbolic objects, and the parallel fixed riches of photographs. Fox Talbot, inventor of the albumen process in printing, was another Neoplatonist, who spent his time photographing the hieroglyphs of Horapollo, locking knowledge in Hermetic visibility. Such English photographers were not interested in amorphous reality, but in making icons of the English mythology.
I couldn’t figure out the title, which may be a hieroglyph. The psychoanalyst J. H. Layard wrote about the hare as a female symbol (picked up in David Harsent’s recent collection, Marriage). Layard was the analyst who trained Peter Redgrove (and briefly impressed the young Philip Larkin). But who knows really.Maybe she serves it with chestnut puree and lardons.
Page(s) 78-80
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