Andrew Duncan
Beneath the Surface of a Great Nerve: Goshawk Lives, by Colin Simms (Form Books, 1995; 31pp., œ3)
This remarkable collection by the Northumbrian naturalist, poet, and sometime Objectivist postpones the guilt-making obligation to do a career survey; the bibliography at the back of this beautiful A4 book lists 40 items, of which intractable and unobtainable largesse Mr Gilonis, by showing me his collection, has demonstrated Modesty (Swaledale Summer) (1974), Rushmore Inhabitation (1976), No North Western Passage (1976), Flat Earth (1976), ParflŠche (1976), Otters and Other Mammals (1976), Voices (1977), Humility (1977, as Spanner 12), Prone (1977), Pentland (1978), Movement (1980), Time Over Tyne: Poems (1980), A Celebration of the Stones in a Watercourse (1981), Ingenuity (Wensleydale Winter) (1979), Eyes Own Ideas (1987), Shots at Otters (1994) as among the most substantial. Hunderthwaite, 100 pages of new poems, has been promised for several years and we are no longer going to hold back for it. The amiable and far-sighted Mr Gilonis has drawn my attention to the connection of five of these works (from the list, ParflŠche, Stones, North West, and 'The Compression of the Bones of Crazy Horse' in Poetry Review 67.1, and 'Carcajou' in Eyes Own Ideas) in a large-scale unified work on the Indians of the northwest states of the USA. Some of the earlier poems are in dialect: separately, North Yorkshire, Northumbrian, and Cumbrian.
Goshawk Lives (verb or noun) is a collection of poems written over about 15 years, linked by the species of their subject matter. Some of the pieces are rather slight prose moments; possibly a relief, as 31 pages of Simms is rather a lot. But there is a big swatch of the all sails spread edgeless onrush, too:
glacial-melt-water valley little into fieldland so that it was forgotten by the farmer
a sinuous scar healed over by the machines except its corn grew darker in the shallow
it brought them up from the south, hirundines black arrows skimming the little clouds of midge
even if they were going east to west, here they turned north and the birds of prey already knew it
where it grades to the river there the spread of the bright green was, and the marsh-marigold yellow
in the willowgarth's annual growth so fresh green it bewildered like its birdsong the willow-warblers
leading up to something on the water cyclical yeasty bubbles showed the first sulphur-yellow wagtails
and up to something the draw led, under the skylarks, sparrowhawks had always been, in this
like so many birds of prey in two sizes.
before they had left the land egg-collecting boys knew that, but their continuity was broken
so that when the sparrowhawks came back after insecticide and persecution they were in three sizes
or even four if you looked closely enough and they didn't allow you to do that
so it was not so bad nor so impossible
the males of the new hawks were near the females of the old hawks in size and looks anyway
near enough for the confusion to be allowed in a country that had eight names for Cow Parsley
they were not long enough about the entry of the warblers and the martins, the sparrowhawks
the bottom end of the dry hollow a natural funnel for the insects finding shelter
in an unpoisoned place, the top end a shallow space where the wind waited
to take their songs away the new farmers who had taken down hedges, trees, fences to enlarge
make every inch pay as if space could be stretched the wind behaved again as in the days of loess
('Spring') Again:
On the dead air it was effort to rise on slow wings what the herons must feel fatiguing
longer and longer flights between fewer pools and more regulated waterways as laid barracks.
Gos had played with one in the air on their way from the railway to the old grainland at height
the massed starlings of winter further north didn't aspire to mob at, and the heron had played back.
Pigeons' conspicuous convergence flung together over the grey-plover stand until they rose and fell
quiet as a shadow across the retina. We are secret people, huddle, come and go as the place does know.
turning to use the sun to pick out the groundbirds by their shadows the gos levelled to fly alongside one
back-marker, twisting with it and gaining then slowing to stalling speed with the plover alone now
and taken with one foot at the edge of reach like off a low ledge, a flurry of wings to the ground
and one wing shaken out over the corpse like a shield from the carpal joint fanwise forward.
bringing to mind how the bird had judged to the point in the stroke of the wingbeat a calm dense foggy morning air precisely where the reach of the mailed foot would be at that tree's protuberant raised-root knarls
were scored by the squirrel scrabbling its indecision the roughbark tiles so often traversed there they
carried hair of squirrel, fox scent, a tarry of dead leaves the brush of the gos' wing scraping just once.
("Winter') And a shorter untitled poem, complete:
ghost moths go feeling-out the outfield holding
both us lost fielders before we go, grey ashflakes in this light
uncertain censering against cicely and hawthorn moulding bright
from nowhere out of the earth the hawk unfolding
furrow from a soft ploughing grassheads spread from his mowing
man_uvring talon to maw, stalling-speed chopped at the blockhole
resuming rowing the heavier for the early vole
Let's pause to notice that this incredibly broad narrative tone, with its exhaustingly long lines, its relaxation, lack of tropes, capacity to notice everything in its slow sweep, effortless rising to flash-moments of spurt, death, and transformation, its tranquillity, alertness, odd didacticism, furious concentration which is never sensory deprivation, unruffled registration of tiny details in a superordinate frame of extraordinary complexity, clarity, and resistance to upset, its geniality, is great poetry. I could quibble with the metrics of these super-long lines, often well over 20 syllables, clearly derived from field notebook entries, but they fairly do sweep me away; so let's cite the hexameter of mediaeval didactic poems-hooching with information, capacious, calm, sweeping- and leave it at that.
The uplands of Britain are full of sheep, and most of the people out on them are shepherds; Simms isn't interested in sheep, but mainly in raptors. At this point we can note the transition from cold observation to identification, and the kind of emotional choice which occupies parts of the outside world; we cross over from the search for absolute truth to the world of Nietzsche. Sheep have a biology too. The dialect project, of course, isn't so far from the pastoral of Theocritus, written in 4th century BC Alexandria in a pseudo-rustic Doric dialect. But he stands out among writers on nature for his rejection of moral allegories or religious instructions to urban Man; among writers on raptors, for his lack of preoccupation with the kinetic, bloody, stirring, air ace moment of snatching the prey; he is unusually interested in many other moments of a goshawk's routine, and is free of cruelty. This chastity is no doubt why he hasn't become a media and TV star, but it also means that his work doesn't lose any of its effectiveness with long familiarity. The hawk's eating for him isn't wildly different from other forms of energy exchange; no projections or hang-ups.
Not only John Riley, but also Simms and John Seed, owe a great deal to the Objectivists, whose pioneering work is newly available in The Objectivists, edited by Andrew McAllister and published by Bloodaxe Books.
Simms reminds me of Alan Ross, because they have both written effective poems about cricket. Ross's comment about Hammond's batting action being impossible to catch even at 1/500 ('Like some prototype birdman/ Straining at silk moorings, he conveys/ Ambiguity, both imprisonment and release') strikes one as a good example of someone trying to identify reality-behaviour and the operation of the brain and nervous system-at subliminal level, to slow down the tiny lapses and direct consciousness steadily on what is characterized by being without conscious control. The batsman isn't consciously controlling his stroke, the lapse between the ball pitching, and giving away where it's going to pitch, and the stroke being largely shaped, is far too short. So the unconscious is capable of far greater precision than the conscious: it's a battery of control systems which are more reliable the older they are. Breathing is obviously more error-proof than thinking about philosophy. Freud goes right out of the window here; the old systems, the mathematics of hawks stooping, are more complicated than the conscious mind. Simms' cricket poem takes up much of Eyes Own Ideas. It's a natural subject for him: the actions of split-seconds- the ball launched from the bowler's hand, the batsman's stroke- exploded and as it were exegesized by the vast white and green space of the pitch, a dozen taut alert brains more than the two of naturalist and goshawk. The ball is a recording instrument; trajectory slows down the ultrashort interval and delivers it to understanding.
What competition lays bare is subtle differences of action and coordination, as characterization, a central Simms theme, has to do; a realm of differences even smaller than the original values, themselves, Ross points out, hard enough to see.
I have mentioned (AE 13 p.95, and AE 9 p.108) the Before as a new site of the sublime, to mean the state of perception before language, of awareness before deceit, of social groups before the arrival of hierarchy, property, and social roles, even of poetry before stylistic polarisation. It is traditional for the Sublime to be cruel and intractable. A certain physiologist is cited by New Scientist for his experiments proving that behavioural reactions preceded conscious awareness, that conscious reception of events was half a second after perception and unconscious brain functions had already calculated the response long before that. So that consciousness appears as something external to the mind, registering results which have already happened; responsible, too, for the verbal record and for deceit. Simms is preoccupied by the first half second after and during sense perception, he is interested in splitting it and getting back to the first fractions of a second, rather than expanding it to include all the sequela of articulation and rationalisation. (Of course, I simplify the detectible operations of consciousness, which has important roles to play in learning and in ambiguous situations.) The data of the senses-the port of entry from the outside world to the internal environment-cannot be the same as what surrounds our skins, and the translation is repeated as it enters a verbal or literary, form. The mediations are socially enhanced or controlled. Perhaps there is a primary flow of awareness, a kind of polymorphous, depolarised, flow of moments without proper names. Moments of perplexity reveal the unnaturalness of any linguistic self-description: the real me is represented as if on stubborn stone, missing detail. Disrupting the verbal code reveals a plurality of superstructures, underdetermined by the flow which is more complex than they are by at least one dimension. Embedded in this network of suspicions and hopes are three intuitions-of alienation in economics, of the prevalence of deceit in public, corporate, and official discourse, of the complexity and artificiality or autonomy of the long process between primary experience and verbal consciousness-which I take to be constituent of the modern Left, basic to modern poetry, and the source of our melancholia. The mediating literary codes from the Civil Triangle (London-Oxford-Cambridge) may be irrelevant to poets from Wales or the Borders. Language tries to capture Geist and releases phantoms. Somehow, occultly, this is linked to distrust of the city, of the South, of people who derive profit from ownership and secondary business activities, of accumulated culture, of poets who aren't writing about animals, and even of French and Latin words. This conjures up a Nietzschean view of the world as infinite surface, where what appears to be a depth beneath the visible is some teleology of social control and enticement. Simms is operating in this area but avoids overall statements or promised ways out. I would say that he is animated by a constant fear of deceit, and of deceiving.
There are a number of variants on this attempt to get back before verbalization, to points t+0.00 to t+0.49 seconds. The attempt in the sixties to get behind two thousand years of literary habits and attain immediacy is one. W.S. Graham's attempt to switch off and make conscious the rules of language reveals a belief that there is something before it. Simple disruption of the linguistic machine, as in Raworth, has gone pari passu with a project of interrogating awareness during its suspension, to find out what its real nature is, even if this can only emerge as an energy profile cracked out from hundreds of different linguistic emissions. Raworth, by abolishing the representational function of language, reducing the world-surface to a stage set, hopes to make visible the manipulations of language, glimpsing the Pristine Unmanipulated the instant after it has disappeared. Chaloner is fascinated by the way perception can be exploited by false signs. But the work of art perhaps is a landscape of false signs, a self-adornment; acquisition is symmetrical to demolition. Adrian Clarke and John Wilkinson are, in different ways, stripping out metalanguage from the verbal flow in the hope that an account without interpretation is more truthful. Denise Riley's poetry is usually searching the self-account for truth, on the assumption that the immediate data of consciousness are often wrong and self-deceiving. The pristine of our spontaneous wishes and of a released socialist society is the missing which in their poems corresponds to the flights of birds, verbally detained, in Simms' poems.
Looking at it, it has to be the individual character/ of a bird that confers nobility; a captive bird, its world released from reason, reflex, and reaction,/ behaves complicatedly towards what it could be, towards one of the changing personalities it could have struck./ True feeling in a world removed from sentiment. ('Winter') He refers to a hawk reasoning. He isn't a Behaviourist; I suppose the surviving Behaviourists are protected in some reserve somewhere, safe except for the odd weekend's recreational shoot by real scientists. The world seen by a hawk's eye is sufficiently complex and ambiguous for a reasoning process to be necessary; the senses yield no meaning. The human world also does not deliver itself to the senses without mediation, conscious thought uncovers the truth. We are only assured of certain certainties because our cognitive channels don't have the capacity to handle the full ambiguity, the multiple part-patterns.
Simms' meditation on the jizz (the preconscious impression of a glimpse that already tells you what species an animal is) is also a meditation on writing: on the deep underlying rule which tells you what to cut out of a poem and what to leave in. The word "essential" or "necessary" is self-referential, any pragmatic definition has to grope with characterization, jizz, and differentiae. I can't write down the rule which tells me what has to go in a book review and what doesn't, but I spend my life applying it. Could you recognise CS's poems from my description alone? this would be a good test. Poems aim to utter what it is about a situation that makes it differ from all other situations. Even, words are distributed at points within the originally unbounded realm of perception where they locate characteristic and behavioural differences. But language is carrying other well-formed patterns of discriminations than only lexical ones. If we, as well as high-performance raptors, can reason, we can recognize situations from many different clues, so the essential could be an overall aggregate, or plural. Editing and selection of detail are completely subjective.
It takes me longer to get a poem's meaning than to recognise the poet's identity, which happens within the half second, by unconscious scanning of high reliability. So the poem is reduced to a behavioural surface like walking, a display of the personality, almost bodily adornment. We are good at using physiological differentiae to recognize individual humans, recalling alliances and allegiances like a mouse identifying individual mice by their scents. What do we signify with poems? what is the act of meaning?
Competitive games benefit the spectators more than the players, by making visible tiny differences in performance; the act of playing is, like poetic style, a self-characterization. This playing with time-values almost too short to perceive must remind us of dialect, where the differences between two dialects draws us into a world whose timescales are much finer than discrimination between two phonemes within a single voice's phonology. A world too fine to codify- but saying that humans are good at discriminating voices is like saying that goshawks are good at flying. So written English, especially Standard English, is simpler than what we perceive, a kind of bureaucratic levelling. The urge to get back to the body-voice agitated the Georgians, and it's not surprising that Masefield, Gibson, Lawrence, wrote in dialect; the finest hour, it may be, of English dialect poetry. They experienced a covert yearning to become peasants and so shed the corruption of being urban and educated; the group, as for example Lawrence, Gibson, Masefield, and Hodgson were also preoccupied with animal poems. Ted Hughes picked up this theme from Lawrence and Edwin Muir. Lawrence demanded (in the intro to New Poems, 1920) poetry of the instant reaction, catching the Present's "wind-like transit", and Simms too is interested in immediate responses, and in the unreflected but highly-tuned actions of animals. Their advance into vers libre came from the same interest in the body and in fine time-discriminations; authenticity located in the shortest time interval. Inauthenticity is perhaps a matter of timing; the opposite of co-ordination. I suppose one of the allures of jazz is that, by confronting rhythms of different periodicity, it conjures up speed differences in a scale of time so small we can't hear it; confronting us with the sublime and the hallucinatory. I suppose the concept of the individual is bound up with this ability to discriminate voices, which again is bound up with the importance of alliances in anthropoid politics; you form alliances with specific individuals and so have to recognize them; an individual you have known all your life may be either your ally or your enemy.
Note that I am adumbrating a position here without nailing either CS or myself up to it. He says:
season accessions reason below barrens earth opens hard
access of gos and secession from reasonableness human hesitation on land
excess is aggression any essence is all-in-eye yet the bird watches
not either of us, but movement, as if the rattlesnake's vertical pupil makes no sense of us, and we do not even know what he sees
or what we see or name as seen. Beneath the surface of a great nerve
only partially warms, like permafrost, even in sight we don't understand
manned in each other's space none of us in the gos's course.
(from 'Gos', first published in AE Twelve) This is not an easy passage, but it is about cognition, not about a specific moment; and Simms seems to be comparing the incommensurability of the mind and the world which it perceives or otherwise builds a model of, and the incommensurability of the snake's world-view and that of the human it observes. I think 'access' refers to a physiological event, like 'an access of rage', seasonally governed and possibly to do with having unfledged young, eyasses, in the nest. Awareness is a physiological state dependent on the physiology it resides in; the realisation that a perception is affected by the species which is experiencing it ("manned in each other's space") leads to the phenomenological investigation of the observer as a factor of the observation, associated especially with J.H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, and Denise Riley. The previous passage ('Fellow, the eyes stream on recognition... eyass-excited') possibly describes the hostility of the range-"owning" goshawk to one of its own kind, recognised similarity the trigger to manning the palisade: in contrast and symmetry to the moment of disrecognition and dissimilarity we have just seen. (There is another version of the same passage on about p.14.)
We can identify two impulses and high achievements of poetry, towards drunkenness and attentiveness. Alertness is a tuned state of brain and body, almost melodic. Reading is not about information transfer, it is an autotelic vibratory state of the reader's cognitive apparatus. We can look backwards, away from the paths of air where birds may be seen, and towards the human observer. The merit of the poems is, I take it, their depiction of a perfectly calm and alert Watcher (with several notebooks stuffed in easily available pockets), in the likeness of a huge recoilless mirror plane to within a few micrometers, with optically perfect characteristics, and it is this calmness which by mimesis affects our mood; inducing attentiveness directly, unconsciously, by exhibiting it. The alertness does not need the birds.
Let me just quote:
"Bitter let all sweetness be, let all these apples be crab!"
Rhubarb-and-ginger jam well-left on cold stone slab
straight from the pot to get its smell, whitewashed larder
harder than when it set, wonder the warmth of its ferment
ice under bog, frogs' courting stun-warms some tundra
the goshawk picks them off in amplexus, leaves skins to mildew
skin off the jam, same maimed dark stain of the discarded.
a charming domestic sketch, where the first line is an acoustic hallucination suggested to CS by the goshawk's mating-calls. The braided theme of exchanging slight amounts of energy also brings us to compare human softness in wanting the lovely smell of the jam with accipitrine squeamishness in spitting out frogskins (even ones with a residual sexual charge). The tundra was in Alaska, the jam in Washburndale.
Recently, I spent some time with my brother in eastern Scotland travelling around looking at Pictish stones. What had at first appealed to me, their bizarreness, disappeared after I had seen enough of them to have clicked with their visual language: disguised by the primitive technique was a wealth of animal themes, something simple, present in all cultures, appealing to two-year-old children around the world, etc. Colin got as far as the Pentland Hills (originally Pict-land, or Peht); their 6th century missionary, Columba, also brought the Animal Style manuscript illumination which after the conversion of Northumbria (from the North) in the 7th century became possibly the greatest cultural achievement of the region; its pages an example of semiotic surplus. Ian Finlay's book on Columba stresses the zoomorphic ornament, which he relates to cultic practice and to the East: 'borrowed by the Celts from their eastern neighbours', Scythian in fact. Possibly the apparently abstract whorls and swirls which grow out of the animals' bodies are really attempts to reintroduce the fourth dimension into the picture surface, restoring the image back to the memory-image of the animal, and depict movement, by which we recognise it? Finlay talks about Columba's cultic relationship with cranes; for Simms, it's hawks. The aesthetics of animal poetry are too primordial to be simple. To get behind Simms' animal poems we would have already to have explained the animals of Dark Age manuscripts (and stones, metalwork, etc.). The animals go right through from La TŠne to Romanesque. Maybe the difference between Pictish and Romanesque is largely one of better-quality metal edges for working the stone. I don't think this is an influence within history, but two examples of a biologically rooted fascination.What, you will rightly ask, is our biology. The clever neurological box which converts from observation through the eyes to imitation, the government of co-ordinated behaviour patterns, is present in many species who imitate their own kind: humans imitate other species as well. This box governs imitation, the realist impulse in art.
If attribution of motive to birds and sheep is a problem, attribution of motive to humans is a greater one, and there is a maze of rationalisation which acts to conceal motives. We don't know why we watch animals. If you say 'children watch rabbits following an instinctive information-gathering program so that when they are older they can catch and eat them', that's cute, but you're only a split-second away from saying "verbal behaviour during sexual relations is inauthentic, a lure, a dazzle pattern" because you have said, not only that instincts for pre-human things, like breeding, are hard-wired teleologies, but also that introspection is inaccurate and even locked out of the engine room. Critique of language is a euphemism for critique of speech, isn't it. The consequences of this proposition for poetry are possibly fatal. If people told the truth all the time, there would be no philosophy; and no Stock Exchange Rules or auditors, either. There are excessively patterned behaviours in language and other forms of culture; the excess suggests that there is not a one-to-one relationship between utterance and the world to be described; the surplus then carries out functions quite other than description, or indeed introspection.
Maybe introspection and self-accounts are always right. We never get to see biology; it's a depth, it doesn't come to the surface. Maybe it isn't there. Where's the test? How can we ask introspection if introspection is right? how could we grade the answer?
next Previous Up About
Peter Hughes
Pearl, by Barry MacSweeney (Equipage, œ3, 1995, 26pp.)
How vividly I recall those tense weeks when Barry MacSweeney's great new poem seemed locked forever within Mr Prynne's hardware. Talk about limbo. Days of waiting, swapped glances, speech pared to a minimum. A tacit deadline approached and the team was selected. They assembled, were briefed, and bonded. On the second evening they were miniaturized and bleeped deep into the recalcitrant circuitry. Their mission: to bring back hard copy hard core poetry by dawn. Bizet, Hart Crane, Raquel Welch, Schwarzenegger and Dylan Thomas' dog went sub-atomic and there wasn't even time to wave.
Arnie, the only survivor, placed the box on the lawn as some gratuitous chopper took off and headed north. We peered in, nervous, expecting the chaotic harmonies of a cultural battlefield, balletic 12-bar tragedies, a stoned surfer's one man beach-head. But this was different from the Barry MacSweeney I knew and loved. The sun came up. Well it would be different, wouldn't it?
When I read Heaney's The Spirit Level recently, I found nothing which I hadn't already noticed in his work nearly 20 years ago. By contrast, MacSweeney can still write as though genuinely responsive to the unfamiliar and, more importantly, responsive to the familiar in such a way as to make it new.
This is poetry of startling scope and seriousness. It breathes through a lot of local, domestic, remembered and imagined seams and fractures as if it mattered. And an old gong is banged to inform you that, unlike some of the poetry on the market, this is not going to be some old chat;
Listen, look, attend; wait a moment
as they used to say
in the ancient tongue of literacy, before
language was poisoned to a wreckage...
(p.6)
So right away we are made aware that we are not dealing with a perception of poetry derived from, say, Wendy Cope or Rolf Harris. Indeed, with the odd line heavily freighted with the alliteration of its remote ancestors, the poem is fiercely literary:
Deep despair destroys and dents delight
(p.9)
MacSweeney makes further gestures towards the lineage of his poem by references to Clare and Shelley on p.14. This line comes in a passage exemplifying the 'scope and seriousness' referred to above;
I walk to the wetted garden where the lawn is short.
All the skies are leased anyway. Nothing is owned
by humans. It is an illusion nightmare.
You fall through the universe
clinging to unravelled knots and breaking strings.
John eating grass. Percy drinking brine.
(p.14)
But perhaps these references suggest that it might be possible to generate some firm and shapely knots, and get a few memorable notes off those strings before they give way entirely.
The passage quoted above concludes;
No B&Q; in my day. No proper ABC.
My mouth a wind-tunnel. I flew like a moth in its blast.
Take my hand and put me right.
This is the end of the bulletin from the end of the road.
That last line might remind you of MacSweeney's potent Hellhound Memos. The opening of page 16, on the other hand, is probably the only reminder of Jury Vet in this book:
All aboard, it's party time, with
my averring slut receptionist.
In the land of panty punishment
she's king.
But such reminders stand out because of their infrequency, not because they are characteristic.
The poetry of Pearl moves suspended within its own sheen of chaste, verdant rainy light with figures and movements from almost half a century ago. Jury Vet it ain't.
Pearl is in fact many things in this rich and beautiful poem. Pearl is a little girl with a cleft palate-poor, barely literate, knee-deep in frost, dung, stream or foliage. Pearl is an association of the effects of light through the material world (and various glimmering pangs echoing across the sparse wolds of the interior). Pearl is a naked bulb glaring on the white knuckles of a present which encourages nostalgic fantasies of an epoch when language was unsullied. Pearl is the late 14th century poem insisting upon the presence and power of a humanity which is ignored or abused by systems of power.
Unsullied language? Well, no, of course. But Pearl is also a recreation of the world of Barry MacSweeney's childhood in Northumberland in the 1950s. In conversation he has described his childhood up to the age of seven, when his parents divorced, as "idyllic". You could fill pages with quotes of magnificent lyricism that communicate the beauty, harmlessness and intimacy of his sense of those years. There is also a fierce distancing of the writing from two versions of public language characterised as "terrible tabloidations" and "paranoid Marxist Cambridge prefects". So this project perhaps attempts to burrow beneath subsequent social and literary strata, to get back to a feeling of psychological bedrock. To be, as Van Morrison might say, "previous".
Permit me to say this on a grey roofslate, as I protect
my poor writing, I can't do joined up, with soaked forearm
from the driving rain...
(p.6)
From the 'rain-soaked deck' of the first page to the stars piercing the remote and unfathomable intimacy of the last moment of the book, Pearl resolutely traces margins. It gives voice to the mute girl inhabiting exposed ground in the teeth of gales from Ireland (where MacSweeney's family came from) and neglect:
So low a nobody I am beneath the cowslip's
shadow, next to the heifer's hooves.
I have a roof over my head, but none
in my mouth. All my words are homeless.
(p.8)
I like the way the big music of the poem comfortably hosts dense packets of detail. Often these relate to the natural world-weather, night scenes. But there are others, vivid as this:
crisps and ox-cheek for tea
(p.24)
Woolworth butterfly blue plastic clip
(p.13)
spam on Sundays
and chips if there is coal
(p.15)
Pearl vibrates with pride and indignation whilst conveying the innocence embodied in Pearl, the girl. It sometimes seems that literacy itself is associated with corruption, and that Pearl is, amongst all the other things, a kind of primal lustre-a latency of consciousness. What some tribes have called the 'soul', I expect.
Whatever Pearl is, it inheres in clumps of words
that can take your breath away;
The congenital fissure in the roof of her mouth
laid down with priceless gems, beaten lustrous copper
and barely hidden seams of gold
(p.11)
I can recommend it.
(The 'Prynne hardware' in question refers to Prynne typesetting Pearl, not to some fearsome prynnalator through which ordinary poems are fed to emerge as intractable entrained paradoxes; although we cannot claim that such a machine does not exist. Chat is a term used by greengrocers for stunted potatoes. -Editor