Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landscape from a Dream
by Michael Peverett
Volumes could be written on this, Elisabeth Bletsoe's intricate Shearsman collection from 2008; here, I won't get much beyond the first page.
intelligence lies
at the edge of the body
in the skin
along the littoral
feeling:
This is the beginning of the title poem. At the end of the poem there’s a – what would you call it? – a topographic note: “Purbeck coast from Swanage to Kimmeridge”. A lot of my thinking around this book, when I move away from the detail, is about regionalism, which has been a big piece of grit in poetry, with a whole lot of questions around it, since Wordsworth. And of course not just in mainstream poetry. Brixton Fractals is a regionalist book. And a re-envisaging of shape/space/time may be particularly connected to regionalism. Elizabeth Bletsoe’s poetry is full of flying dislocation like a post-avant book, and contrastingly full of careful evocation like a mainstream book, and full of bodies of knowledge unrecognized by the academies, like a hippie avalon south-western book, and in short she is exactly what a modern Dorset poet ought to be. But. Would she, for example, be giving a second thought to Paul Nash's surrealist painting if it had not just happened to incorporate a view of cliffs near Swanage? Doesn't this local repossession of internationalism imply a drastic foreshortening of context? And, by the way, an unsurrealization of Surrealism?
The acuter pressure of this issue in regard to Bletsoe as compared to Allen Fisher is twofold: 1. Landscape from a Dream scrupulously suffixes its poems with locations, and never puts a foot outside Dorset. 2. Bletsoe’s poetry is welcoming and immediately attractive and for all its learning pretty accessible, and I’m sure she really does reach a regionalist audience that includes some people who are more interested in matters Dorsetian than they are in the supposedly wider world of poetry, and that audience is something that most P-A poets don’t either have or want.
The nearest I can come to understanding this regionalism is via homeopathic provings (Bletsoe is a trainee homeopath), which involve an assertion of place as a definite and individual fact, not just something that "happens to be". I "happened to find" this well-documented account of a proving of Stanton Drew (stone circle near Bristol), if you'd like to take it further.
This intelligence of the coast is two-way: here the exposures are what give names to Jurassic sedimentary stratigraphic formations that course through Europe – Kimmeridge Clay, Portland, Purbeck. That geological map is an intellectual construction, true. Kimmeridge Clay is economically very important because of the hydro-carbons on offer. You may think that the poem is aware of this larger context, though it doesn't say so as such.
the weight of the cumulux
hearing:
your tidal breath
filling my cavities
in liquid carbonic interchange
fissility of shale, its
slaking,
plasticising when wet;
relict textures of petechial haemorrhage,
spermatozoa,
saliva,
oil
foliaceous, split-
layered like fingernails, revealing
the stem-ossicles of a crinoid
ghosting
shattering
with equinox
nb "cumulux" maybe isn't a neologism, I don't have the OED to hand, but it is anyway a very rare word, though since adopted by a fast-emerging Canadian player in the cloud-computing market.
nb "shattering with equinox". I first thought to say that this was a neat, Latinate, intellectual way of referring to the rhythms of freeze-and-thaw erosion. Does it ever freeze right down on the Dorset coast-line? More to the point, probably, is the "x" in cumulux, texture, equinox..., visually representing the shattered X-shapes of shale exposure.
On to the next page, and we're swimming.
walled up inside
translute bricks of water
....
making a slip,
slipping in
grafting on a limb
to a limb, fused
& drifting
through the amnion
in marbrine light
above our bodies,
the underneath of the surface envelope
is an ametrine laminate
nb "marbrine", from old French, e.g. memorably in Ronsard, or Aucassin and Nicolette: "A la fenestre marbrine / La s'apoia la mescine" (at the marble window the girl leaned out). Bletsoe borrows the word because its "ine" sound suggests transparency to English-speakers - ultramarine, piscine, tourmaline etc.
*
Landscape from a Dream is, kind of refreshingly, just a bunch of poems and not a project. I don’t mean this is rare in poetry generally, but it’s rare in the kind of poets that I like to read. There are basically six poems, and each one is a world to itself, and four of them, at least, have the dumbfounding clarity of recently-witnessed miracles. Apart from “Landscape from a Dream”, the others are:
“The Separable Soul” which goes into a kind of sustained take-off, as if the swan’s water-beating were effortless.
“Birds of the Sherborne Missal” which is a kind of reinvention of the art of illumination, in words.
River-ephemera gather at Smear’s Bridge: pollen spicules, florets of eltrot, a meniscoid bulging.
Four women-from-Hardy-novels monologues – (they don’t have a collective title) – not very reminiscent of Hardy, or of novels. In fact a transformation, whose distance from Hardy is there to be measured and wondered at.
swollen, we are twin horns
you standing at the mouth of a shining-walled labyrinth
*
At some point I planned to compare or to contrast this:
their flames
Light a sycamore-key, turning it to old gold
As it unicycles gently down to the table.
Peter Redgrove, "The Feast Under the Clitoris-Tree" from Abyssophone (1995).
My original point, I supposed, was to compare the sensuality of that well-placed Latinate word. But now I think it was because Redgrove is also a poet of transformative miracles. Either way the comparison is inevitable and Bletsoe must have been dogged by it all through her career. OK, so it's lazy thinking, and I just love to quote Redgrove. Anyway, her poetry stands the comparison, doesn't it? As the "Hardy" poem epitomizes, regionalism becomes a distant thing because of the action of the poem.
Landscape from a Dream by Elisabeth Bletsoe was published by Shearsman in 2008 (ISBN: 978-1-905700-87-5).
*
* by Tom Jenks
Published by IF P THEN Q
£8.00
ISBN: 978-0-9558641-6-2
reviewed by Philip Davenport
Online, if you watch the launch of Tom Jenks's new poem '*' you'll see him look off to the side as if something has spooked him. It's a gesture that characterises this book-length poem, there's a haunted feel to the thing. When I read it now, I can picture Tom's face part-shadowed, reading in one of those nonspace corporate bars that we usher our lives through.
* is a poem of hard surfaces – hi-shine fake oak counters, faces on monitors talking adspeak, food suffocated in its wrapper, cheap jewels, 2nd hand software. The '*' refers to the 'select all' function in databases and the poem duly takes its Poundian slice of everything. But this isn't a poem containing history, it makes a point of dodging all but an immediacy flash-fried and box-fresh.
'to hitch a star to random data
to squander our gifts'
There's no sense of an overarching schema, no symphony, no grand homophonic ending. This is channel-hopping faster than eye or ear, driven by panic and punctuated with nervous jokes. In the tone of it, I'm reminded of nobody so much as neurotic old Brit comedians, Kenneth Williams or Hancock, the weirdness of their emotional hygiene, the horror at the approach of their ogres. Held in the throat of the poem is Ken Williams's skreeking laugh, Hancock's tussle with the melancholy of each bloodied day.
'with some things we have not truck e.g.
terrifying interior worlds of women
are terrified of trees are fearing certain stones
in illuminated manuscripts
seen sideways in the trails of comets'
The idea of a wider hollowness is tracked deep into the piece, initially in its restless taxonomy of consumables, then in other clues. An empire-size collapse is at first gently prefigured, we're shown distant smoke on the horizon:
'somewhere the Tsar his meerschaum pipe
storyline'
It is later in the book that we find portents of decline turning up in the guts of the pickings, learn to see Russian dolls as falling dominoes:
'decay of late capitalism
winter palace
crow under arc lights
each room this golden peacock pagoda'
Notions of hollowness, overload and entropy are not new; but Jenks presages two things that are.
Firstly, his own characteristic voice is particular and notable – the lugubrious humour, the deftness of his craft, his gift of lightness. He's taken the poetics of collage and happenstance and turned them into an enthralling schtick. At times, this sacrifices the density of the writing, as comedy often must. But his power is that he utterly holds his audience, and then – as he reads – himself in his own sway.
Secondly, he's one of a number of poets trailing a difference in approach to process and system writing generally. Geof Huth would be another, Holly Pester yet another, select your own version. Cut-up, vispo, excision, aleatory procedures and other strategies of avant writing are being used here not in and of themselves but as methods employed for an ulterior expressive purpose. They are colours in the palette but they do not decide the composition.
Here the expressive act is driven by emotional need, not process. Reeling back to Schoenberg and the desire for 'heart' rather than Cagean processes carries all the danger of a reactionary act. As reward for the risk, * redraws the map of the mainstream, spilling confusion into the shape of new territories. This is a materialist poetry that eschews narrative for the pleasures of the text, it's an un-story, that has found other ways to seduce the audience.
'she eats a crème egg like it's an oyster'
If Tom's still online, look at him. Remarkable isn't it? A perfect locus for his poem, the ideal sounding board, MDF-ed and formica-ed, littered with beer accidents. Just before he read ('in books I see these melancholy things') football guys were howling the place down; you can nearly hear the rip they've taken out of the air.
The piece twitches across its pages too, as if the lines are in shock. They break where they shouldn't, spill all when it's least advisable. He's chopped articles and conjunctions so that there's a hint of faded hipster in the syntax, old pop maybe?
'he got compressed air he
grow rhubarb in window box he
got sound grasp Jungian analysis'
'he got…' re-sound's Lennon's junk guru in Come Together – 'He got juju eyeballs, he one holy roller…'
'got cool fans got numb gel got little levers'
The poem both laughs at and loathes itself, Lennon hissing 'shoot me' low in there. It mocks the idea of an epic anything, the pompousness of a prophet.
'I love the man but he leaves his toys in the garden
that fire engine with authentic siren
frost got in
now it sounds like icecreams'
You almost feel sorry for the lines, the task Jenks has set them is ludicrous and they know it. Select everything? Must we? It is this polite acknowledgement of absurdity while still trudging on that gives the book the tone of wry Britishness, Uncle Ez muddling through a wet Scottish holiday.
Even as Tom Jenks swipes at the thin-ness of the everything he's found - the poor make, the cutback thinking, the culture-kill, the conceitedness - along with it comes the discovery of something hellishly funny. He just can't stop looking off to the side of the stage, where it shifts. He is fascinated by it, by the slippage of the language disguise, by the correct beauty of its coding, by the big shiny new it brings lurching in.