Eyewear is glad to welcome Norman Jope (pictured here lounging on grass in Budapest) to the Friday feature.Jope is one of the more intriguing innovative poets now writing in the UK - his work is at times satisfyingly strange, exotic and linguistically rich. I have previously anthologised his work in the Nthposition anthology In The Criminal's Cabinet.
Jope was born in Plymouth, where he lives again after lengthy periods in other locations (most recently Swindon, Bristol and Budapest) and works, as an administrator, at the College of St Mark and St John.
His collection For The Wedding-Guest was published by Stride in 1997, and his poetry has appeared in many magazines, webzines and anthologies. Ex-editor of the magazine Memes and lapsed reviewer for a range of magazines and webzines, he is currently preparing two large-scale retrospective collections (one of poems in verse, the other of poems in prose) as well as editing a critical companion to the work of Richard Burns for Salt.
Mourzouk
from Suspended Gold – Saharan pistes
The body’s fear becomes golden. Something in the body, which is called ‘the mind’ but consists of a brain that falls to earth in a parachute of nerves, is splayed out in heat. The distance is reduced to the space between two pincers, but the body shines. Antares ascends at nightfall, casting its hematite net across the dunes. Towards morning, the arc-lamp of Mercury rises, paraffin-pink, between the constellations and the sun… but the body shines at dawn, is a golden gap that trembles.
Sun-side, shadow-side – the same exposure. Skin ground down to ashes and light. Walk here even in imagination, and one is exposed, impaled, on tomorrow’s side of everything. Here, one is under the spotlight of the One – living from moment to moment by grace, in a constancy of confrontation, where the pulse of thirst repeats itself with the terror of the first time.
Thirst exists at every level of the need pyramid. And there are fears at all levels – that the water will only prolong the agony, that familiarity will smother all miracles, that the One has no love to share with the Many, that the effort is doomed and one can only await one’s eventual desiccation. So the dunes of Mourzouk hold both promise and threat – they allow the gods of thirst to express their divinity, whilst offering them the obliteration not normally imposed on gods. They offer all, at the risk of withholding everything.
So fear emerges, a burning water flowing between two cliffs, swelling to the point where it is the river, not the banks, that are noticed. To row through the desert, on a river of this nature, torments the traveller. But one is cast into that honey-coloured space, exposed and called as if to account, where any hiding-place would immolate the intruder.
So, the moonwalk walked in dreams on the dunes of Mourzouk. One faces what is – one’s impending death. One walks, leaves footprints which are steadily blown away. Yet one is briefly golden, here on the golden ground of the silent sand.
(prose) poem by Norman Jope
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