Reviews of Pacale Petit, Leontia Flynn and Jane Griffiths

Pascale Petit, The Treekeeper’s Tale (Seren, 2008) £7.99
Leontia Flynn, Drives (Cape, 2008) £9.00
Jane Griffiths, Another Country: New And Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008) £9.95

The status of the poetic sequence in contemporary British verse is excitingly uncertain. For while more and more poets published by mainstream presses are shaping their collections around series of related poems, these would-be ‘sequences’ often don’t work in the straightforwardly linear fashion one would expect. Instead, much exciting poetry being written of late seems to be based around what could be called the ‘exploded sequence’ — a run of poems which, whether or not they actually follow each other on successive pages of a collection, nonetheless share the same fundamental subject. To borrow a phrase from a well-known sequence, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Squarings’, such poems are ‘test-outs and pull-backs, re-envisagings’, taking the lay of the land from all angles — instead of working up her idea into the perhaps premature certainty of a traditionally well-wrought poem, the poet approaches and investigates something more like a broad theme from multiple perspectives.

There remains the possibility, however, of the form becoming less than cognitive, of its demonstrating, in the place of an active, questing imagination seeking all sides of a subject, something more like creativity trapped in a particular gesture, of the poet tapping a deep source only to find the potential intelligence of her procedures dissolved in crude affirmation. Pascale Petit’s fourth collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale, ostensibly takes for the subject of its eponymous first section the ‘giant coast redwood trees of California’; in pointing this out, Seren’s blurb suggests a movement beyond the confessional thrust of her earlier collections. But reading through the book, one soon realises that it remains centred around a sequence of ‘I’-based poems which suggest that Petit’s poetic strategy has not changed greatly from that of her previous works. Excluding minor variations on the theme, no fewer than five poems in the aforementioned section of thirteen begin stridently with ‘I’, like ‘Redwood Canopy Explorer’:

I hang in the spaces between canopies
and when I pause for silence it hits me —
the total silence.

As in the poetry of Ted Hughes, this kind of aggressive questing after a state of primal wholeness can come to seem not only rote and confining but slightly disturbing in its repeated movement towards a state of aboriginal clarity — a movement which suggests the destruction or at least the negation of urban civilization before we can return to a state of untutored innocence:

Every dip into the chalice of the sky-pool
yields an unknown species. Everything is dawn-new.

That chalice is particularly reminiscent of Hughes, who repeatedly introduces goblets in particular into his descriptions of nature to outfit his storm-wracked sublime with an element of imperial power-worship. Returned to ‘total silence’, to a moment when ‘everything is dawn-new’, Petit’s speaker repeatedly approaches a condition of absolute simplicity prior to culture; in ‘Atlas Moth’ she describes the creature trembling on the speaker’s hand familiarly, by now, as ‘ a new world, warming up for its first flight’. She likes that kind of striking, often violent ending — ‘Morning lies in the gorge, raw as ripped wood’ — and it makes her poems individually powerful but also gives them, like those of Hughes, a sense of melodramatic overkill when read in sequence.

This is a pity since there are moments in this collection of genuinely sensitive writing, which one’s jaded attention risks missing out on when reading through the book as a whole. ‘Chandelier-Tree’, for example, modulates its initial ‘I’ based-line gently into a subtle perception:

I find myself staring at the spaces between
fronds, where pure blue plumes appear,
the air painting itself on my eye.

Not only is this direct and beautiful writing, but it also shows that strident subjectivity at work in Petit’s writing recognizing its debt to the object, the need to look steadily at the world with a determined wise passiveness. Reading these lines I wonder if they stand out so clearly because ‘Chandelier-Tree’ is only the second poem in the book as a whole; and this raises questions about how poems of such intensity should be arranged in collections. For better or worse, we do not always read poems in isolation; we turn the page from one to the next and our experience of multiple lyrics can become blurred or enriched by that readerly overlap. This is the secret of the modern type of exploded, or casual sequence; but perhaps it also works against a certain kind of poetry, like Petit’s, whose sheer force becomes excessive when broached repeatedly.

It can, on the other hand, be the case that individual poems which might appear too thin when read in isolation develop the requisite depth and challenge when read as part of just such a sequence. Leontia Flynn’s new collection ‘Drives’ contains several biographical poems named for their protagonists spread throughout the book; read individually, they can seem deceptively lightweight. Here is the end of ‘Robert Lowell’, a poem which perhaps can be taken as representative of the whole exploded sequence insofar as Lowell’s own biographical poems are clearly behind this new turn in Flynn’s writing:

But imagine leaving his third and unreal wife
in order to return to his suffering second,
revising and revising
as though they were just lines or matters of form

the living details of a living life?
And imagine using those letters in his sonnets?
Using and re-using
the fact of pain — as though pain were a poem …

The gist of Flynn’s sequence is that the intellectual accomplishments of the writers in question cannot be separated from their often miserable physical and psychological condition. This is not original subject-matter — in the next line she admits in parenthesis it’s an ‘old story’ — and as a standalone piece of writing the lines above do not achieve the worked density of Lowell’s unrhymed sonnets in History. The anti-formal gesture Flynn makes, in contrast, towards ‘the living details of a living life’, must ultimately peter out with such a tautology, since despite the well-known history of Lowell cruelly re-using snippets from his wife’s letters, for example, in his poems, those elaborately ‘revised’ works still manifest his genuine, if frequently insensitive attempt to commemorate lived experience.

The aesthetic Flynn cleaves to is different, and has its own virtues, but such a full-frontal attack as this seems unfair. The great strength of her thrilling first book ‘These Days’ lay in how her fresh-sounding voice never tried to work up into a prematurely aged repose those mundane jarrings recognizable from any young person’s life — touch-and-go relationships, life in the city, the allurements and disappointments of mass media. Her style is bitty but honest, honed but casual, her poems short and clinching like a good advertisement. The problem, as that might suggest, is with the occasional lack of depth, as if this innovative young poet is still holding back from really pressing a bit harder on her initial conceptions, and breaking through the pleasurable shock of a good anecdote or a ‘glib epigram’ (’Dorothy Parker’) towards genuinely poetic insight. In its place ‘Drives’ provides a type of hipster cynicism which can become wearying, as in ‘Personality’ — ‘How do I cope when poetry is part of this bullshit?’ - or slack, as when ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ simply points to the director’s well-known mother neurosis as if to say ‘look, here’s another poem for my sequence’.

I’ve lifted that observation, or the style of it, from Flynn herself, and her terrific poem from These Days, ‘My Dream Mentor’, where the speaker is specifically told ‘don’t write about anything / you can point at.’ The best poems in ‘Drives’ are those which go beyond pointing, as Flynn’s enviable ability to corral multiple aspects of the contemporary urban world into her poetry gets supplemented by something more numinous, never religious but certainly something that can’t be pointed at. I quote the excellent ‘New York’ in its entirety:

There are several things we did not want to find in New York:
not the snow which fell this year on the Easter Parade,
not the Calypso phase of Talking Heads’ David Byrne,
not the figurative work of De Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
Not the vapour trails which ribbon the city’s sky,
not the queue for the iPhone™ outside the Apple Shop,
not no smoke in the bars, not no real New York Poets’ school,
not the places that are gone from the re-drawn map.

These long, superficially enumerative lines in the manner of Michael Longley’s prompt the question as to what exactly the speaker did want to find in New York — a question that can’t be answered, as the pointing finger stalls in empty space.

Flynn seems to be getting here at something connected with our sense of place, but not precisely cognate with it; in doing so, she approaches the central theme of Jane Griffith’s titular sequence Eclogue Over Merlin Street, as recently collected in Another Country: New and Selected Poems. In these poems, the matter-of-factness of home as a structure is repeatedly pervaded by a sense of loss — the blurb describes a ‘dialogue between [the] two voices of an immigrant in London, one embracing her new life but the other still haunted by displacement’. Writing carefully, Griffiths paradoxically engineers exact visual recognitions through blurred juxtapositions of the present with the past:

There was a building site opposite, a house
just sketched in scaffold, the shouts
of men in hard hats limbering up its

four storeys, pausing at ceiling height,
gesturing single-handed with a plan.

It is for now we live here —
a one-sided square like a hoarding,
the sun mosaiced through a mass of plane trees,
building on the world at our feet

          — for now we live here.

Repeatedly Griffiths returns to the home as the point from which intellectual exploration starts out; the solid ground beneath our feet that allows for untethered exploits of the imagination. In ‘Ode to an Empty Flat’, the life-work of beginning afresh in a new location becomes continuous with the composition of the poem itself:

Beginning is difficult.
It is clear what’s behind sticks of furniture.
The wall exists to shadow the chair.
The chair is a fistful of uprights against the wall.

Like Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space, Griffiths intuits behind the standard contemporary experience of moving into a new apartment our most primal anxieties about establishing a secure homespace — what he describes, of a bird’s nest, as the origin of our confidence in the world. The ‘sticks of furniture’ and the ‘fistful of uprights’ suggest the clenched dwelling of a caveman more than a present-day city-dweller; but it is to Griffith’s credit that, while she gestures towards this dimension of pre-civilised experience given more explicit utterance in Petit’s writing, she ultimately refuses to jettison the data of modern urban life. ‘On Liking Glass Houses’ cherishes

the untidy ones, skewed down gardens like an accident
with a log pile, windows for hindsight, or wedged
anyhow in the angle between hedge and railway line.

The way their emptiness invites a pause,
the way a sinuous movement against the glass
resolves into a cat weaving through iris …

Beginning with her object, Griffiths often gently modulates into a description of thought itself, or an apparently physical manifestation of such cognitive process; in this case, the visual ‘pause’ of the glass smoothly ‘resolves’ into the ‘sinuous movement’ of the cat. A subdued (intentional?) pun on ‘paws’ highlights the associative character of thought moving from line to line with a slow, deliberate intelligence; in writing of such close attention, ‘resolves’ takes its full weight as a word expressing a genuine commitment of the imagination. The high-def resolution of Griffith’s description encodes, as in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, profound psychological verities; every time the poet approaches her, or somebody else’s, or nobody else’s dwelling from a different angle, we learn something new.