Malleable Histories: Charlotte Newman on McKimm, Connolly and Bramness

Michael McKimm, Still This Need (Heaventree, 2009). ISBN: 9781906038304. £8.
Susan Connolly, Forest Music (Shearsman, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610262. £8.95.
Hanne Bramness, Salt on the Eye: Selected Poems, trans. Hanne Bramness & Frances Presley (Shearsman, 2007). ISBN: 9781905700417. £9.95.

Irish poetry is almost a literary genre of its own, with so many of poetry’s modern and contemporary giants — particularly commercially viable giants - springing out of the Emerald Isle. As well as producing a great many of poetry’s mainstream names (Heaney, Muldoon, etc.), it has a characteristic obsession with Ireland itself. There is a trend in Irish poetry to be ecologically aware, and it frequently displays an inability to get out of Ireland’s geography. As such it is difficult to know when reading a new collection by a young, Eric Gregory award-winning Irish writer, how much of this apparent sameness of content is down to prejudice based on my reading experience and how much is due to a genuine trend.

Michael McKimm’s first collection bears these trademarks; it follows in an Irish tradition, certainly. It is Ireland-centric in subject matter, showing traces of ecopoetry and psychogeography, but it is impossible to limit McKimm’s collection to such labels. Yes, the landscape plays a central role in these poems, but the landscape is a springboard for nostalgia. His mode of observation may be nearly Wordsworthian, but McKimm is not merely concerned with the act of looking and seeing; his work is far more sensually evocative. Sometimes this leads to somewhat bizarre remembrances: love poems hanging on the act of eating salted cod, for instance. These personal touches on the landscape may or may not grab a reader’s interest, but they rise above mere observation and description.

Salt is a recurring referent, appropriately so given that it is a product of both the earth and the sea, which form the basis of McKimm’s pastorals. It is also a taste enhancer, analogous to the occasional flecks of seasoning that his variations in diction produce. When McKimm steps out of his homeland, the surprise of encountering another setting is refreshing not just conceptually but phonetically, such as in ‘Still Life’: “All Hallow’s Eve, another vixen fresh off Hackney marsh,” brings the soft Gaelic consonants up against a harsher, foreign tongue.

His work is at its best when it produces friction, particularly phonetically:

a frisson in the wires
that slice the pitches, where ping on leather
meets the thump of white-paint post, branches
clacking in the trees, tarpaulin unravelling
on the building sites: grit, sand and aggregate.
                                              (‘The Lammas Lands’)

Here McKimm undermines both the pastoral and its favoured medium: the lilting line and untroubled language. He replaces it with a rich juxtaposition of consonants and onomatopoeia, making the landscape seem autonomous, even vicious.

These poems have a simplicity that may be pleasing to many readers, tending to emphasise the visible, the historical, the geographic, rather than sequestered subjectivities. The subjective voice stays fairly fixed. For example, it is difficult to separate the geologist’s voice that recurs in a number of poems, from the speaker’s, so the speaker cannot be an everyman. As a result, it is difficult to know what to make of the rather flagrant use of the first person plural: does it assume the readers’ perception participates in, or is at least sympathetic towards, the speaker’s perception? But McKimm’s work benefits from creating these complexities, and from building a relationship between reader and writer.

One long poem, ‘The History Lesson’, is charmingly ludic, recalling childhood mnemonics. These are placed alongside more straight-faced nostalgia and dark patches of history, tersely delivered in varying verse forms:

When Thomas Ashe refused to eat
they held him down
and inserted a tube into his throat,
through which
they poured the jaundiced mulch
of his food. There was deep
guttural choking as he died. The Crown
maintained he suffocated in his sleep.

The collection is most successful when exploring sexuality and intimate relationships tenderly, through geography, but with geography taking a secondary role to sensual and emotional honesty. This can be seen in the quartet of prose poems ‘The Lake Effect’, or in ‘The Moose’, which nods to Elizabeth Bishop and then digresses into coming-of-age recollections about budding sexuality:

Allowed to stay up late and play cards,
to choose where we went, have a few sips of wine,
and I properly got into boys for the first time
watched them diving off the raft, young
bodies play-fighting, those swelling lungs.

The language in this poem, as in most of the collection, is simple — sometimes surprising — but never abrasive. The collection leans on tradition with its attention to naturalism, geography, and in particular, ornithology, but opens itself up to the reader most successfully when observation is transcended by the sensual. It helps to support McKimm’s final line of the collection, which asserts that: “We alter daily, and find our histories malleable.”

Fellow Irish poet Susan Connolly again follows the tradition of Ireland-centrism, and her reserve is very much the idea of malleable histories. She prefers to write in short, clipped lines in comparison to McKimm’s pentameters, and, although both are characterised by nostalgia, there is a childlike innocence to these poems, making them resemble fables in contrast to McKimm’s adult knowingness. She makes history malleable by creating mythologies, blending hearsay, overheard stories and imaginative presumption, some pertaining to biography, some to apparent history.

Instead of mere recollection, Connolly seems to be creating some kind of litany out of language. The image of the “reddening sea” in the collection’s epigraph recurs at regular intervals and in various guises as a kind of mythological omen. At one point, in a poem entitled ‘The Biology Lab’, there is a sudden, violent shift away from childhood nostalgia and mythology, as a schoolgirl clutches a knife, wishing to self-harm:

I want to see blood.
My blood.
It is the moment
before the axe
strikes a tree.
Blood flows,
a river running
out to sea.

The poem feels personal, the speaker trying to become a part of nature. The poem alludes to a tension between Pagan and Christian histories. Later the Christians are accused of “defacing us” with “Christian sledgehammers”. Yet even before this appears there is a sense of Ireland’s shifting historical allegiance, which the collection traces. Some readers may feel alienated by the use of Gaelic, particularly in Connolly’s experiments with shifting subjectivities and murky religiosity, which can create relatively impenetrable poems.

The second section of the book becomes a series of Apollinaire-esque visual poems which belie the simplicity of the opening poems. The circular word-constructions bear a striking resemblance to Ferdinand Kriwet’s Text Signs. But what makes Kriwet’s work fascinating is the way he contracts words together, usually to create something bizarre and suggestive, like “sodomestick”, “sadomasorry”, “lipubertype” and “pubesoteric”. The second section of Susan Connolly’s ‘Mirrors’ - the section that most resembles Text Signs, does not work so generatively, depicting two circles in mirror image containing a single sentence: “Every poem is a mirror / look long and deep / you will see there / the lines of life.” There is a sense somehow that, while as typographical patterns Connolly’s pieces are visually arresting, there is little substance to them as poetry. However, it occupies an ambiguous space between text and visual art and, although the exhibition of this space is not new, it places Connolly’s collection in an ambiguous space between traditional lyric poetry and the avant-garde.

While translation between different creative media is problematic enough, translation of poetry can be even more fraught with problems. The Baudelairean suggestion of its being like “kissing a woman through a veil” seem apt, but does it make a difference if the poet works as co-translator, as in Hanne Bramness’ Salt on the Eye? Translations usually pay scant attention to structural detail such as line breaks — a translator’s minefield where meaning can be lost or changed irrevocably. The (very few) early poems in this collection are no exception to this rule, but as the poems move on through Bramness’s career, experimentation with line break, lineation and punctuation increases too. The poems are long and languid, without any sense of urgency or intensity, though lines are usually short and well-clipped.

When the author is involved in the translation process, it seems appropriate to view these poems as versions of the originals, rather than translations. Care has been taken with sound and sense in English, so that these Norwegian poems are not merely the empty products of being put through a cipher. There is also a sense of playfulness, an awareness of the pitfalls of language difference:

“The sea” is also
                           Debussy’s dream
by the instrument
La musique souvent me prend comme une mer!
there
         at the limit of words
and in the gaps between notes
                                                   is a silence
         which does not silence
                                                   (‘In Her Time’)

This is a collection of poems with a global span, not rooted in Norway, or any one culture, but drawing on many cultures and stealing from many languages. There is a sense in which this translated collection suggests that poetry is — or is often considered to be — its own language, which can be alienating for a reader. As such, language change is no more of a barrier than poetry itself. Bramness asks:

               what happens to language
in constant opposition
               to the laws?
                                             (‘In Her Time’)

Whether or not it succeeds depends on what a reader expects to glean from such a collection, but it is a thought-provoking challenge nonetheless.