Poems from The High Window, Tears in the Fence, morphrog, The Journal, etc.
I like "Birds for someone who cannot hear" - it reminds me of Eluard. I struggled with many of the other poems (but then, I struggle with most of the poems in "Tears in the Fence"!). The extracts from Emma Lee's review below give a somewhat false impression of her review as a whole, but the implied sentiment is one I share. Much in this book is at first sight unresolvable, and it's not clear how I should react. Should I sustain a superposition of multiple interpretations (after all, why should there be a consistent backstory?), or seek an interpretation that connects the maximum number of the dots, ignoring the rest? Will deducing the poet's intention help? What if I'm looking for something that isn't there, and isn't supposed to be there? Forcing contradictory terms together (reality/dream, sound/silence) with Wildean abandon is easy to do, but paradoxes aren't in themselves suggestive after a while. Are they supposed to be?
Take for example this beginning - "Cell/1,/ 5,/ 3,/ 4,/ 7,/ 1,/ a prayer granted:/ 6 square metres/ for a narrow bed/ and another one/ on top". I confess to being suspicious of short lines, so from the start of this poem I was in need of reassurance. Why the commas? Are the digits a cell phone number? No. Is the cell a prison cell, the 6-digit number being the convict's ID? Or a monk's cell (which ties in with "prayer" but not the number). Why not just say "bunk beds"? A narrow bed is sometimes used to mean a grave, but I can't see that working in this situation. Should I worry about what the prayer was? What am I missing?
Here's the start of "Sentence" -
| Look up to where our days were numbered. |
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When the righteous speak they proclaim each sentence twice: the culprit and the one omitted are equally to blame. |
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How such a fraction creates the mathematics of double innocence becoming guilt. |
What fraction? I've heard of the phrase "Two wrongs don't make a right". Here two rights make a wrong. Maybe society is unfairly criminalising an activity. But why the line-breaks?
Throughout the book, line-breaks puzzle me. What are the line-breaks for in passages like "The last time we were free,/ on the forbidden way to Malmö, / a taxi driver from Beirut/ mistook me for an Iranian:/ ‘No doubt with that nose’,/ he said. ‘It’s fractured too.’"? That said, I can see how in "Shush!" the typography (in-line spaces, etc) supports the idea of silence contesting with sound - "here we/ learned through carnage how the weight/ of words that fill us is/ assessed by/ silence, the ordeal that we carry;/ the decades now/ negotiated, all my/ poems have come back to me, to/ lure me into// this".
Poems that start with [historical] fact drift too soon for my liking into evasive philosophising. "The painter's wife" deals with a theme I've recently seen addressed in a novel. What I miss here are real life details - the poem fades into abstracts. After some anecdotes about Durer, "Traumgesicht" ends with "The persons we become/ in other people’s narratives/ are trite confabulation/ that might eventually destroy our lives. .../ One fallacy is asking for a judge/ to understand what truth is./ Innocence and guilt/ can only ever be poetic./ The painter knows/ that justice is an altered dream.". As far as I think I understand these putative insights (I suspect qualified judges do understand various theories of truth), I don't think they're saying much. Indeed, I wondered if they were AI-generated.
Phrases
Several phrases puzzle me. Here are just a few -
- From CPH-EDI-CPH - "to climb up the stairs, turn (around) the corner," - Why "up"? Why the parentheses (I know they're trendy, but all the same)?
- From Kingfisher - "Like a clock mimicking knowledge, the blade designed to forge our veins" - I'm happy with the first clause, but does "forge" mean "fake" or "shape from metal"? In either case, how does a blade do it?
- From Outcome - "I’d inevitably be a raptor of memories,/ stubbornly piling up words." - but I don't think raptors pile up their prey. Even if they do, would they do it stubbornly?
- From Return - "contorted as a snake/ abruptly expulsed from/ the daily habit of/ saving our lives." - was the Eden snake contorted? It wasn't expelled from Eden, let alone "expulsed".
- From Falling - "We would dream of flying,/ crawl swimming across the sky/ as if through water" - Why add "as if through water"? And front crawl is a stroke in swimming, so "swimming" is a nearly redundant. Maybe just end with "front-crawling across the sky"?
These problems I have at the micro level discourage me from trying to resolve my macro level issues.
Themes
Birds feature in titles ("Birds for someone who cannot hear", "The nature of the bird"), subject matter, and sources of imagery ("I once knew a boy/ who could speak/ the languages of birds", etc), sometimes combined with another theme, that of confinement. Great tit, robin, thrush, heron, magpie, kingfisher, blackbird, kittiwakes, gannets, and auks feature.
A prevailing theme concerns distances between two views/modes of the same thing - mirrors, dreams, photos, reflections, memories, ghosts, being half-awake, "The persons we become/ in other people’s narratives", "I inhabit the space between symbol and thing". Several of these tropes are combined
- on p.59 - "ghosts need someone to see them/ more than the living./ Their memory leans quietly on me,/ hitting me like gushes of wind./ I think they’re trying to tell me –/ the life we could have had is/ a mirror image, doing things in our place."
- in "The painter's wife" - "She dreams with abandon./ That is the place where/ she is still embodied. ... Do they remember/ she used to be texture,/ her brushes as tangible/ as his? .../ Like a ghost she is floating/ through the canvas"
Notes
I think the book could do with some endnotes -
- "CPH-EDI-CPH" - CPH and EDI are the codes of Copenhagen and Edinburgh airports
- "decuman" (p.8) - ???
Conclusion
Emma Lee talked about the "confidence to give the reader space". The reader may decide to exploit that space to question the poet's confidence. It takes nerve to achieve the clarity of Magritte.
Other reviews
- Emma Lee (It’s not immediately clear whether the “you” is the birds or the message’s recipient ... It’s not known how long he was away. ... It’s not clear who “she” is other than someone who knows him but does not live with him. It feels unresolved ... It seems odd to suddenly remember you have no friends, especially when the speaker seems to have been the one who moved on ... Fössinger has the confidence to give the reader space to inhabit the poems and draw their own conclusions.)
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