Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Werner Aspenström: THE BLUE WHALE and other pieces, translated by Robin Fulton. (£2. 82pp. ISBN 0-903375-48-6)

Tarjei Vesaas: EVENING (O Book no. 3), translated by Anthony Barnett (£0.60. l6pp. ISBN 0-903375-57-5)

Johannes Edfelt: FAMILY TREE, translated by Robin Fulton (O Book no.4) (£0.60. 24 pp. ISBN o-903375-56-7)

All published by Oasis Books, London, 1981, and distributed by Independent Press Distribution (IPD), 12 Stevenage Road, London SW6 6ES, England.

     I have no hesitation in stating that I consider Oasis to be the finest and the most enterprising of the English small presses. It’s been in existence for over a decade now, and is beginning to become a real force in British literary publishing - the 1981/2 list proves that fact. Also, unlike many small presses, Oasis is wide open to foreign works in translation, and to prose as well as poetry. The current list includes works by Carl Rakosi, John Ash ( a long poem in the O Book format, plus a full-length collection), Alasdair Paterson, Gunnar Harding, Tomas Tranströmer and many others. One of the bedevilling factors in actually marketing small press books has long been unprofessional presentation, and lack of originality in packaging. Ian Robinson has tackled this problem head-on at Oasis :- the Aspenström is superbly presented in a matt-black paperback format, with a white stuck-on information band running around the book. This is almost exactly the format of the Berlin publisher Klaus Wagenbach’s Quarthefte, and it’s a format I’ve long admired. Then there are the ‘O Books’. Now this really is a good idea: midget ‘pocket’ books of individual authors, about 4 inches by 5½, and running up to 24pp, plus endpapers. All in a uniform green cover, with a variation on the ‘band’ theme marking it out. The possiblities of the ‘O Book’ format are almost limitless, if the quality can be maintained. At the rate of 6 volumes or so per year, it’s almost a miniature magazine. I have only small quibble : the Edfelt volume contains all 8 of the prose poems that I printed in SHEARSMAN 3, but with no acknowledgement. On the other hand, my former magazine, IMPRINT, gets an acknowledgement in the Vesaas, so I have a 50% success rate.

     The books: well, on the Edfelt I’m biased. I published more than half of it myself, and I like these prose poems a great deal. I think, one or the bigger publishers, like Princeton, with their energetic translation series, could take on a large Edfelt volume and do us all a service. The book is well-presented, as I said above, and has, in addition, 2 excellent line-drawings by Ian Robinson. Family Tree is a good title, because of the overall emphasis in the book on memory and the author’s ancestors. The poems have a strong, solid imagery, and a striking awareness of the real world surrounding the poet. His observation of his ancestors is also true of himself

     Their lives must have been passed close to the earth, they must have been bound to the rhythm of the year.

(Family Tree)

and unlike many prose poems, the prose is poetic:

     In their old age some of these men of the ploughland would be seized with an aching anxiety about God and the Devil, an obstinate terror or hell-fire and sulphur. Bible, Psalmbook and homily would come out, the pages thumbed: stern words, lofty words, trernendous words on sin and retribution mumbled beneath the soot-blackened rafters. Space itself was full of rolling bells, of the surge of penitential and funereal psalms:

We dwellers in this world below
Are captives all of Death.

     And Death came: sometimes creeping slowly into a body wracked by rheumatic pains, on a fold-down bed; sometimes ambushing swiftly, as when a tallow dip is puffed out by a sudden draught.

(Family Tree)

     There is a tensile strength in this writing, and, of course, in the translation. Robin Fulton has managed to write this version as though it had always been in English - one of the real tests of translation. Edfelt’s world is a world of dreams and memory, lost echoes trailing out of the subconscious : The memory: the room cluttered with lumber. The dust of a lifetime gathers there. (The Memory). Clearing out the lumber room gives us some excellent poems.

     Tarjei Vesaas is better known in England as a novelist several of his novels have been published by Peter Owen - than a poet. EVENING is a slim collection of 5 poems translated from Vesaas’ Telemark dialect of Norwegian.

     Rowing, Rowing and Fishing Ground both lean to a kind of expressionist imagery that one rarely finds in English verse : No one knows / who laps at the rock / when it is dark./ No one knows the bottom / in the Sea of Fear.,’ No one knows / who it is cannot- row. (Rowing, Rowing), and Death in the boat is quiet./ Death in the boat is blind. (Fishing Ground). The poets vision is bleak, and his world is a menacing one, so the final short poem Greensleeves on the Radio is a pleasant relief: I am not I / only the wind in the leaves,/ come so far / for this one song. Vesaas is worth investigating - perhaps we can hope for a larger collection I know Anthony Barnett has about 200 poems translated, so perhaps some enterprising publisher should contact him.

     I don’t pretend to be the world’s most astute fiction-reviewer, but I’ll try my best with the Aspenström. Oasis did in fact publish a good selection of poems (37 Poems), also translated by Fulton, some 3 or 4 years ago. For a start it’s good to see a small press following up a good writer like this, and letting us get to know more of such previously under-recognised foreign writers.

     Aspenström’s language shows the poet’s eye at work, even in the most prose-y of these stories. His narrative technique is also a poet’s : always a first-person narrative or a monologue. Also he is as concerned as Edfelt with the memory. To cap which, the easy rolling monologue style, deceptively simple, makes some of the stories read like prose poems :

     Nowadays the brook and I don’t have much to say to each other, we are equals only in our loneliness. He is bound in his course, I in my knowledge of life and death............Simplicity dissolves under the microscope or thought, turns into its opposite. What I’m describing is a feeling of presence in a time that no longer exists, in a nature which does not be long to me but was once, a long time ago, mediated to me by a stranger, a child with my name. I experience and work over that stranger’s reality as my own property, perhaps my only tangible possession. Of myself I have no memory, I was nothing that moods and atmospheres flowed through.....

(The Brook).

Memory plays one false, in a way, so that the past takes on a golden glow, that perhaps it has only in retrospect:

     But what does happiness consist of ? I asked around and discovered that one demand was inescapable, one should be under-age.

(The Sunflowers in the Dark)

Despite this, however) the poet’s eye is still awake, questioning his perceived reality:

     Those terrible premonitions of the day when one’s very language becomes unreal and foreign, when the words detach themselves from the things ! Why is the hand called a hand and the pen a pen and the city a city ?

(If I had a Key)

     Aspenström weaves some fascinating patterns in his decidedly unusual prose style. I’ve no idea if these are really stories, or events, or epiphanies, or prose poems. Whatever they are (and only one or two use a recognisable prose narrative) I’ve found them fascinating to read, and would urge any reader of this to obtain the book as soon as possible. You could get the 37 Poems at the same time, which I believe costs £0.90, also from IPD.