Magma Poetry

Natalya Gorbanevskaya will be best known to some as the activist to whom Joan Baez dedicated her song ‘Natalia‘. Part of the Soviet dissident movement, Gorbanevskaya was arrested in 1969 and interred in a Soviet psychiatric prison for several years. Though the work by no means relies on it, some knowledge of Gorbanevskaya’s life helps inform her spare, powerful poems and this volume of translations by Daniel Weissbort provides an accessible introduction to both her work and life – useful historical notes are offered unobtrusively throughout.

In these Selected Poems, the beautiful and the brutal are dangerous bedfellows. Political landscapes are often described through tender evocations of weather: coming rain or “the indomitable wind / over this absurd, wide world”, the place where “an icy wind / chills the bright surface of a well.” In an extract from ‘Seaboard’ (1956-1966), the poet describes facing death with equanimity:

I lay my head on the scrubbed block
As on a lover’s shoulder.

It seems glib to talk about the elegance within these bleak poems, because that suggests their starkness needs to be dressed up. Not so. Gorbanevskaya often spares us nothing. Take the short poem ‘Autobiographical’:

They gave the fool free rein, gave the rascal freedom
And he beats his free head on a wall.

The reader can’t help shuddering with recognition. Often, in fact, the beauty in Gorbanevskaya’s work seems to make it all the more devastating. Even her less overtly political poems shiver with quiet menace, like the intriguing ‘Unfinished poem’, written in 1965 (and arranged in translation as a sonnet). We find an unnamed person wandering a town in which

Night has erased the year,
The age from the building’s facades,
The town, bleak as an allotment,
But also like the Ark…

In the chill of dawn, things begin to return to their familiar shapes until finally:

You come to yourself, weeping,
On the bridge, over the Yauza river.

There’s a clarity in the work that reminded me of Japanese Death Poetry, written from the urge to distil the world just one last time. It’s this that gives the poems what Daniel Weissbort describes in his introduction as a ‘strange depth’.

I won’t say too much about the political context and content of these poems, because others far better qualified to discuss Soviet history have done so elsewhere (the book includes a fascinating interview with the poet by Valentina Polukhina, rightly placed at the end of the volume, after the poems themselves). Instead, what fascinated me most about Gorbanevskaya’s work was its relationship to the way our brains work. In these poems, there’s a preoccupation with the relationship between truth and fabrication. In an extract from ‘Alien Stones’ (1979-82) we’re told ‘this truth is a lie’:

This truth, I insist on,
Don’t, don’t believe it,
Don’t test it, with a knife pinning
Its tender throat to the wall.

Elsewhere “singing is like lying”, art is both sincere and insincere.

Neuroscientists like Benjamin Libet have suggested that our experience of time is something of an illusion: in short, memory is not a process of retrieval, but of reconstruction. When we try to ‘recall’ a memory, we also rewrite it, so that the time next we go to remember it, we don’t call up the original memory but the last one we recollected. So, each time we tell a story, we alter it (all the time remaining genuinely convinced of the ‘truth’ of our memories).

Gorbanevskaya’s work is full of re-written memories, implied stories, developed until we’re not quite sure where they started from. Her work isn’t indecisive, it’s a recognition of the true nature of memory, as in this extract from ‘Last Poems of the Last Century’, where the narrator occupies a strange hinterland:

My hands not holding the pen
My evenings not well-illuminated,
My midnights neither bright nor warm…

This no-man’s land, Gorbanevskaya recognises, is the real territory of human experience. Her poems draw the reader into that experience and invite us to be lost there, for as long as we want.

Helen Mort
Helen Mort won a Foyle’s Young Poet Award on five occasions and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. After two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, a third pamphlet, ‘Lie of the Land’, was published by the Wordsworth Trust last year. Her first full collection, ‘Division Street’, will be published in 2013 by Chatto & Windus.

Selected Poems by Natalya Gorbanevskaya is published by Carcanet Press, 2011, £12.95

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

I was interested in reviewing The Model Shop because Williams hails from my own part of the world and is just a few years older than me. I hoped to find the cultural icons I grew up surrounded by, rooted in a familiar environment. Williams’s style is one of clarity and precision, with a quiet wit in his sidelong glances at things. Like William Carlos Williams, F.J. sees ‘poetry only in things’. The title poem acts as an intriguing opening to the collection, as he compares model making to world creation, the maker to God:

God repeats himself in the flat-pack doll’s house, The rubber furniture and plastic piano Hushed of all arpeggios

There was a moment during my reading when these two books merged. It occurred shortly after I set down my copy of The Tempest Prognosticator and picked up Neptune Blue. At one moment I was visiting the Motel in Fairvale through the eyes of Isobel Dixon, as she took on the viewpoint of Lila finding Bates’ mother sitting in her chair in the cellar with

the woven shawl, the grey hair Gathered in a careful bun …

The title poem, ‘House of Tongues’, is after Paul Bowles’ 1947 short story A Distant Episode which recounts the capture and physical mutilation of a linguistics professor travelling through an unnamed country that is probably Morocco. The professor suffers an emblematic violence when his tongue is cut out by a band of Reguibat tribesmen. It’s a strange and compelling narrative that stays with you long after reading and House of Tongues has a similar effect: these are subtle yet invasive poems that creep into your psyche and occupy space.

In the poem, Wicks skilfully interweaves the original narrative with a more intimate domestic tableau, where

Noel Duffy’s choice of title for his debut collection is a good early omen. It neatly and precisely draws together the book’s deepest concerns. In the Library of Lost Objects is primarily concerned with preservation and restoration: the poems that play with this theme are uniformly more satisfying than the ones that don’t. To be more specific, when Duffy employs his knowledge and intimate familiarity with the natural and geological world, the poems flow with quiet assurance.

This refreshing curiosity about the inner workings of the stellar bodies, magnetic fields, beehives and fossils is the fuel for his poems; richness, even in such mundane things, comes from being in a world in which life is precious and survival always possible. A few key poems lend the book a sense of cohesion and, with ideas so thoroughly connected, even a few lesser pieces gain in vitality.

In one of many gems in this extraordinary first collection, Ailbhe Darcy compares her emotional (and, implicitly, artistic) self to “a solitary magpie”:

reflecting every colour and none, playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind

Rupert Loydell is not one of those poets who will publish a mere 100 or so gems of perfect poetry over a whole lifetime. He’s not Larkin, or Bishop, or Bunting. He’s more like Emily Dickinson, or John Ashbery: he writes a lot of poems and sends them out into the world, and isn’t afraid of over-production. I find this refreshing myself: but inevitably, it means that among the books, pamphlets and collaborations he’s sent forth over the years, there will be some poems that work for me and others that don’t.

Like Ashbery, his poems are basically about his life and times; unlike Ashbery, though they sometimes use cut-n-paste techniques and are sometimes humorous, there’s none of the odd angles and non-sequiturs of the New York poet. These poems are often in plain, simple language, often conversational and personal, with a kind of resigned grace to them that is very appealing to me:

I’m a sucker for dogs. Dogs are not taboo in poetry as cats are. I cite Suzanne Batty’s ‘The Barking Dog’ and Chase Twitchell’s ‘The Language of Dogs’. Mark Doty, too, writes dogs into poems and his memoir Dog Days. However, the dogs of the aforementioned poets appear as energetic Buddhas; cheerful, deep, embracing the ‘now’ that contemporary writer-owners find elusive: “This shining bark// a Zen master’s gong, calls you here,/ entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow” (‘Golden Retrievals’ in Doty’s Sweet Machine). Gregory Woods does not present dogs in this way.

The title poem is, after all, ‘after Kakfa’. This dog chases an ambulance and then turns off: “the bystanders reconcile themselves/ to knowing / it was just an ordinary dog.” This disappoints: don’t we want the dog to follow its injured owner all the way to hospital? We already know that life is bleak, don’t we want the poet to transfigure the ordinary dog? But Woods might be right to deliver such a poem and he avoids (even comments upon?) the sentimentality of other poets who rely on emotionally manipulative story-telling. Yet Woods does not restrict himself to a purely plain-speaking or realistic stance.

[Introductory note from Magma Reviews Editor, Rob A. Mackenzie: This is the first in a new series of monthly blog reviews. We've lined up a great team of reviewers to write these, which will (I hope) be up to the same standard as the print magazine, and will enable us to review an extra twelve or so books a year. For this feature, I send reviewers a list of five recent collections and ask them to choose one to review. Mark Burnhope chose Egg Printing Explained, Katy Evans-Bush's second full collection.]

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American writer, Kent Johnson, sounds off on the thorny subject of poetry reviewing. He suggests that reviews and blurbs have ‘begun to blur in purpose and effect’:

Fawning, toadyish criticism, then, is likely to remain the default setting so long as “negative” reviewing constitutes a potential hazard to the position and advancement of the poet-reviewer. (Interestingly, by the way, it’s in top-tier journals like Poetry where negative reviews are most likely to appear, since the capital accruing to the poet-reviewer compensates for the risk.) Given this, maybe it’s time that magazines, of all aesthetic shapes and circulation sizes, resurrect the venerable practice of “unsigned” reviews. There’s no question readers, in the main, would be tickled and intrigued.