Kim Lockwood reviews
To Build
My Shadow A Fire, The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill, ed., Michael
McGriff (Kirksville , Missouri :
Truman State University
Press, 2010)
by David Wevill
To Build My Shadow A
Fire should position Wevill as a cornerstone of the poetic canon. This is no mean feat, as many of his
contemporaries ā Atwood, Larkin, Heaney, Hughes, Lowell and Plath ā are part of
a mainstream cultural consciousness: theyāre poets who people who know nothing
about poetry, know about. That Wevill doesnāt already lead this list is
staggering. His work has won numerous awards, and spans forty-five years and
several continents, drawing from his birth in Japan ,
his youth in Canada ,
emigration from North America to England and subsequent return. In
terms of willingness and ability to address social and personal identity, itās
difficult to think of a poet better deserving of mainstream attention.
McGriffās selection highlights
the thematic preoccupations with individuality and language which endure
throughout Wevillās career. Itās a wide-ranging and ambitious selection, which
makes it clear that Wevill doesnāt need to become a ānameā: Wevillās work
should appeal primarily to people who do
know poetry, who understand the constant refinement required to produce work
that remains accessible and relevant, fifty years after it was first written. To Build My Shadow A Fire reveals
Wevillās stylistic devices, showcases his development and shifting poetic
focus, and highlights his continued ambition and experimentation.
Wevillās early poems are in love
with language. McGriffās opening gambit, āThe Two-Colored Eagleā, is wracked
with consonance: soft ābās pepper the verses, (āHer back is against the
south,/Her brackish beak is raisedā); the opening line wrings its paired āwās
(āThe last days wrenched her inward completelyā) for all their worth.
Adjectives are stacked in Jenga towers, almost giving way to the indulgence of
sound over necessity in āthe perfect dead breathless quietā and āthe blind deep
drumming of bargesā. āPuddlesā similarly overflows with linguistic quirks. Most
notable are the coupled contractions, which prove tricky to get your mouth
around: āThis deep puddleād split, diminish, and with a gulp/Involve me, so my
lancing furyād break its bottomā. Alongside the overt cleverness of the
alliterative āClean as a cupcrackā, this display of linguistic flair initially
seems slightly bizarre in contrast to the sombre fear of loss articulated at
the poemās close:
Out, the weight of water, slimy
tension of skin,
Might rise to collect me, much
later,
And suddenly, when Iām feverish
or weak.
But Wevillās firecracker flourishes reveal their own faƧade:
languageās sounds are bravado, brazenly hiding the fear of being unable to
control or order the surrounding world which frequently paralyses the
speaker.
By his third collection, A Christ of the Ice-Floes, these
creeping fears have caught up to Wevillās speaker. The titular poem and
āWherever Men Have Beenā form the culmination of Wevillās meticulous revelation
of language masking, rather than illuminating, external reality. These poems
exist in the liminal space: what is unsaid and left unwritten becomes more
glaring than what can be wrangled onto the page. Dashes jab at the end of
lines, ellipses rise and fall in the centre of verses; the previous assuredness
of Wevillās tone falters as the poems leave space for images to move outside
language: mallards swim āaway downstreamā¦ā; water is āSwaying, risingā¦ā. These
poems demonstrate one of the defining qualities of Wevillās appeal: his poems
are leaping off points, the reader dared to plunge into the space beyond the
explicit.
This crisis of faith in language
coincides with an āIā appearing in the book for the first time. Stripped of the
illusion of language as transformative (or even as a reliable crutch), the āIā
is necessarily passive, ālit from behindā, walking āwhere the axis spinsā,
unable to keep its āfooting in the whirlā. This āIā remains engaged with the
external throughout To Build My Shadow A
Fire, entertaining masks as it searches for a temporally and geographically
grounded identity which exists outside of language. Wevillās poems frequently
pose simple questions ā āWhere are the words?ā, āAnd you, what can I tell you?ā
ā without offering any answers. When words do appear, they haunt: āWords spoken
at dusk/still echoā, and hearing a retold reality is unbearable, as āMemorial
IIā reveals:
Now I do not want to touch
the real body and the real grass
see the real trees
Because
your voice will begin to
describe
the leaves, the ladybugs
roots as they are
Yet, Wevillās speaker is trapped: without language,
ālife//is another form of time/without substance, breathingā. While the more
playful adoration of languageās neat tricks has faded, the deeper focus on the
frustrations and limitations of the tools of his craft seem to celebrate the
essential nature of language, for all its faults and flaws. McGriffās Firebreak selection closes with the wish
for simpler, purer language, more honest in its intentions: āI could talk like
that//spare word that needs no mirror/that does not dance for itselfā.
The pieces from Where the Arrow Falls is the
collectionās first stumbling block, for the simple reason of logistics: āPart
Oneā offers excerpts from an untitled poetic sequence. Just as listening to The
Beatlesā ā1ā isnāt the same as firing up āRevolverā, the necessary fractioning
of the sequence makes it less cohesive and accessible than the selections that
surround it. That said, āPart Oneā draws together the imagery hinted at in
Wevillās earlier works and thrusts it into the limelight. Masked Navajo and
Cheyenne vie against the elements as time alters (and yet doesnāt alter) the
landscape; snakes rot ābrokenā Sās āin the stony dustā while the speaker
launches more overt attempts to locate themselves spiritually, temporally and
geographically in relation to the āvenom/in memoriesā¦ā and the blood-soaked
āstones/of dry Texasā. In contrast, āPart Twoā strips these associative masks
back, leaving the poems rawer, appearing structurally more vulnerable:
reading
the weather
and Lawrence
our nerves
make love, we
tear like webs
burn in the late day sun
things here
and absent
There is an endearing simplicity in āPart Twoā. The poems
are grammatically sparse, grow slowly in line and stanza length, and speak with
a conversational wonder and frankness which, after the loftiness and
declarations of āPart Oneā, is refreshing. Nakedness creeps through the poems:
āQuiet as stones, but/unable to weather as stones//our skins/are in loveā; āwe
wear clothes/for the trees and birds/not for each otherā. āPart Twoā unfolds
like a slow exorcism, culminating in ā12ās wild, unconscious circus of freaks
and Fools, and the relief that desire can be transformative, āas even the
stones fitted to one anotherā.
āPart Twoās sense of openness
echoes in the sonnets Wevill returns to throughout his career. He is at his
most direct when toying with the weight of tradition, using his contemporary,
deconstructed sonnets to play with āthe search for a form/that doesnāt existā.
In āSpainā, bitter, fractured narratives are cinematically cross-cut, the seven
couplets switching focus between quiet oak trees and āan abandoned police
barracksā, while railing against the speakerās unnamed āyouā:
Youāve
earned
the silence you wanted
[ā¦]
You
held your sex
like
a bouquet of lilies, close to your face.
You
gave yourself away at noon like a bride.
This fracturing of a form which inheres completion continues
in āShallotsā (āWhen she spoke/the little shell-like syllables fell apartā) and
āLate Sonnet Vās declaration that āVirtually nothing is wholeā. The sonnets are
poems of voices, of āWalt Whitmanās voice crying outā and āimagined [ā¦] voices
singingā, until even silence itself is entertained as āa way of speakingā. The
speakerās own voice is at its most brutally frank in the sonnets.
āNamelessnessā opens with the simple, explicit:
I
donāt know who the āyouā is any more
when
the word writes itself instead of a name
Wevillās at his best when heās at his most frill-free. Many
of the masks he dons, often openly discussed as guises, shadows, not-selves,
are undoubtedly well-constructed, but feel like obstacles that get in the way
of the more effortless and unflinchingly āhonestā tone Wevill is so capable of.
Wevillās confessional side dresses up
for its audience again in his prose poetry. To put it simply, these poems are cooler
than his other work. The mock insouciance and open pain of the collectionās
title, Casual Ties, gives good
indication of what lies ahead. The
dense paragraphs come at the reader with a fractured bravado, a battered Dirty
Harry shouldering too many troubles and using cigarettes and nonchalance to
stop any of them cutting loose. āThe Big Listā showcases Wevillās wittier side,
(āThe other day a scrap of paper crawled in my direction, wanting an immediate
answer [ā¦] Scrap of paper, I said, get fuckedā); āBirthdayā offers film noir
via Baudrillard, (āThe gun might be empty, like the two notebooks. Or it might
be loaded, like the two books, one of which I wrote myselfā); āTalkingā has a
self-defining fugitive logic, (ādriving beyond the sound of my own nameā). When
this directness wanes in the face of increasing panic and finally retreats into
the familiar territory of literary myth (āSuch is art, Orpheus ā what was your
secret?ā), you canāt help feeling a little sad that there arenāt more glimpses
of this persona throughout the book.
McGriff closes To Build My Shadow A Fire with a
selection of Wevillās translations. These focus largely on Ferenc JuhĆ”sz, the
award-winning Hungarian poet translated by Wevill for the Penguin Modern
European Poets Series. Wevillās own introduction to JuhĆ”szās work illustrates
the thematic overlap between the two writers, as both enter into āa dialogue
between the poet and the wildernessā. Wevillās translations exude grandness and
assuredness that isnāt present in his own work, capturing JuhĆ”szās poetic
extremities of emotion. āComet-Watchersā and āThe Flower of Silenceā are
terrific in the traditional sense, one speaker watching āa stallion with wings
and a diamond mane,/a mane of fire, a streaming tail of bloodā and the other
declaring āMy nerve-tentacles weave through the dripping stars/Squeezing and
sucking the blood of starfishā. āThursday, Day of Superstitionā, perhaps best
demonstrates JuhĆ”szās stylistic quirks, a panicked eulogy for a vanishing sense
of national and individual identity, where the speaker is āLOSING [HIS] MIND!ā
in a hedonistic Hungary, figured as āa neon medusa drifting aboveā. Wevillās
talent for conveying the voice of another is clear, and JuhƔsz, Fernando
Pessoa, San Juan de la Cruz and Alberto de Lacerda are undoubtedly poets
deserving great attention (the line āEvery day I discover/The incredible
reality of thingsā by Pessoa, under the pseudonym of Alberto Caeiro, alone
should set readers frantically Googling), but the inclusion of the translations
in To Build My Shadow A Fire does
feel slightly out of place. On one hand, it takes McGriffās collection into
territory which Wevillās earlier Departures:
Selected Poems (Shearsman Books,
2003) did not cover, but on the other, it becomes another mask in a book
already littered with guises. Wevill is an elusive figure, and these
translations place him that little bit further beyond reach.
In a post-Tweeting society, it
seems appropriate to summarise Wevillās appeal and relevance in as few
characters as possible. Thankfully, ā* 49ā, the final poem in Wevillās own
works, does this eloquently:
Not
to
say
something, but
to
say
toward
something, I think
says
it.
In
an hour the sun will rise.
There
are no clouds.
Watch
with me.
Although Wevill undoubtedly has the ability (and cause) to
be cocky in his work, as in ā*49ā, his instances of poetic grandeur are tempered
by the persistent awareness that poetry is an eloquent, but ultimately
substanceless, shadow.
Kim Lockwood has just completed a first class BA Honours in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University and is taking up a place on the MA in CW Poetry at UEA autumn 2012. She is the co-editor of Lung Jazz.
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