Download - Survivors Poetry

Hands is subtitled fifteen variations & no fugue; it isa minimalist effort making poetry/music analogies:one word = one note in a staff notation score. It alsotraces, verbally, a musical map: ‘a city of/hair–triggerarchipelagos’ . . . ‘four–finger archipelagos –/diminishingisland/strands’ (interesting play on arpeggio andarchipelago). Symbolism of the piano: “white hand/abovethe keys/knows what black/hand within/does” . . . “onehooked finger –/hawk hovering/over its prey”. Finally,musical notes are transformed into all media of notationand recording: “every note/ever written smitten/withblood sharpened through/bone.Laura Seymour was a Foyle’s Young Poet of the Year in2004. Her opener here, Running Over the Pianist’s Fingersis akin to Petrucci in that it draws on piano imagery. Themusical undertones continue in Young: “Bach (tinnedby the nurse)/played at his birth.” Into the biologicalarea with Waiting for his Death. A Jabiru is a speciesof large–winged stork to be found in Central and SouthAmerica. The bird may have flown to its death in somemountains, and become embedded in ice; the poet wrapsit in a shroud, presumably to bury it. There is a senseof honouring life while respecting the dead: “I alternaterock with melting”. A Time is a lugubrious portrayal ofan elderly relative. Film – strange reflections on an icon‘squat chocolate Pharaoh’. Living human beings support,and are supported by, their icon: “Humans crank myinsides . . . stickle my inner ovens with dry straw/andmud slapdash of boxed bricking.” They give the subjecta preview of a future film, where she is reanimated, andthen drowns herself. Two interesting abstruse referenceshere: ‘bird–third eyelid’ (The third eyelid or nictitatingmembrane contributes to tear formation and distribution.This light–pink structure normally rests out of sight inthe inner corner of the eye. Sometimes the third eyelidwill cover both eyes and make it appear that your cat’seyeballs are disappearing.) ‘Hobbididence’ is the ‘Princeof Numbness’ referred to in King Lear, Act IV (are theHobbits derived from the same source). ‘Pleached peachtrees’: Pleaching is a technique that may be used totrain trees into a raised hedge or to form a quincunx.Commonly, deciduous trees are planted in lines, thenshaped to form a flat plane on clear stems above theground level. Branches are woven together and lightlytied.” (Wikipedia). Footnotes to this poem would nothave been amiss. How Did The Moon . . . ? a mythicalbird–creature: “I laid/one egg like/myself . . .” The eggis a non–quantity: ‘breeding/nothing, only dimming.’ Itmay in the future be unearthed as a meaningless relicin ‘pocky hoover’s dust–bag’. From Endymion – thesubject here seems to be the reverse of a visionaryKeatsian heroine: ‘her memories pared un/cyclical,her head a toenail’ (interestingly, a sage’s toenail wasreferred to in the previous poem). The final stanza hasconsiderable contrariety. She is posited as becoming aseed–pearl in the night sky (risen) then compared to anecklace cast down. Then: “The lost sequential necessityof words. Not that she ever wore any”. Does she losesignificance/coherence by becoming immortal (breakingthe bounds of mortality)? Then there is the ambiguousdistinction between her wearing a seed–pearl and beinga seed–pearl. I have yet to nail down Keats’s seed–pearlreferences. Cycles Of Earth From Moon – some cogentsurrealism, drawing analogies between the cosmos andeveryday activity in the kitchen. I like ‘undecimal askewregularity’. Interesting comparison between blocking offan unpleasant odour and using a life–giving oxygen mask.Don’t Worry I find, frankly, obscure. Is the imminent ramthe zodiacal sign of Aries? Is it coming to the rescue insome shape or form? I found the choice of ‘algidity’ a littlestrange; yes – I could find it in the dictionary, but mightnot pneumonia or hypothermia conveyed the meaningmore effectively. Nail imagery again – ‘nails clots’. Theimage of the cisterns is juxtaposed with the reference tothe deceased husband. What is the connection: was thebody thrown into the cistern? Is the bank a rivulet/streamone, or a financial one? Santa – surreal gloss on Christmasstockings. Appropriate organic/ecological reminder of thesource of goosefeathers. A loaded stocking is compared toa menstruating woman. Flapdragon: ‘a ragbag of possiblyamusing and occasionally informative stuff about words,dictionaries and reference books, along with assortedfrivolous nonsense and bombastic rants.’ Ursids aremeteors originating from the constellation of Ursa major.Bizarre linking of stocking with mahogany sleigh. Satan:dialogue of good and evil: someone prefers the vitalityof evil “even do I crave/a mouthable gag of searing/brimstone rather than a hypothetical/Heaven. ‘A jasper–gold tiger/devouring a semi–conscious human being’? Thisseems to derive from Hindu mythology (though with asuggestion of Aztec). Again some abstruse vocabulary:‘Anch’ may be short for ‘anchorite’; ‘knowtweed’ seemsto be a corruption of ‘knotweed’ a Japanese herbaceousplant. Again, more detective work is necessary. Pygmalionis a novel reworking of the classical myth: here the twoprotagonists are birds – the iconic figure is a peacock(‘stands for femme fatale’), its admirer a fieldfare.There’s no overt portrayal of the fieldfare as equivalentto the sculptor. And the icon is far from perfect: ‘theglitter of her/lies on her dipping eyes . . . false carnationof her cheek’. And the idyllic garden is full of woodenflowers. A cynical slant on ideals of beauty. Legs: weirdindeed – a suggestion that in a previous incarnation theperson addressed was a cuttlefish – with horizontal legs.When they are vertical, life gets complicated: “now itboils vitreous against your sockets” – is this referring toan overweight person? I can’t quite relate the figure ofthe prince to the earlier part: is he a casual observerfrom a safe vantage point? A helix (pl: helixes or helices)is a type of space curve, i.e. a smooth curve in three–dimensional space. It is characterized by the fact thatthe tangent line at any point makes a constant angle witha fixed line called the axis.Oils embraces art and music. The first stanza deals with oilpainting restoration, including a reference to the use of eggto revitalise the oil paint. But with the last line we read“I reached out and ashed all works”. In the second stanzathere is a switch to a child chorister (presumably in thesame sort of locale as the ?former oil paintings: “the liftedchild’s/voice is tubular as a letter pushed into a pipe.”The poet is given a mark on the forehead from the child’sshoe. This seems to have been taken from Sikh mythology,reiterated to some extent in The Wizard of Oz. In the thirdstanza, the child is spirited away, entwined with a sycamore‘propeller’, having an unrestricted passage into the voidbecause of its non–value, “since it was no–one’s/true giftunworded’. Odyssey Beginnings suggests an ultimate stateof death: “The still megapolis/where God died”. The secondstanza suggests the building of a funeral barge, to be rowedby ‘the last human’; the third masses of people who havebeen drowned and encased in sediment.38