The London Magazine

A Literary Landscape

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Winter Migrants, Tom Pickard, Carcanet, 2016, 74pp, £9.99 (paperback). Quennets, Philip Terry, Carcanet, 2016, 135pp, £12.99 (paperback).

Tom Pickard’s Winter Migrants begins with ‘Lark and Merlin’, which won the Bess Hokin prize in 2011. A sequence of lyrics, so precise that they evoke the ‘scalpel song’ of the wren described by Pickard, boldly moves between hawthorns, oral sex, a café scene and descriptio­ns of the weather. The following, taken from the sequence, recounts:

drunk winds stumble over shuffling roofs shake his sleep who dreams a lost love will not let go

The wind frequently finds itself in Pickard’s lyrics – it becomes a background, a force and a space to inhabit – seeming sometimes to evoke the sixteenth-century apostrophe: ‘Christ, that my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again!’ Although, in the ‘Prologue’ to ‘Fiends Fell Journals’, the stamina of this parallel becomes less certain as it suggests a more contempora­ry context:

When my lover became my enemy I made a bed amongst winds and drove the old road till my heart crashed. Where’s the bypass?

Pickard’s humour flits in and out of Winter Migrants. At times, it is as though this humour seeks to outwit lyric poignancy. Elsewhere, unadultera­ted pleasure is taken in the landscape. The wind guides sound in Pickard’s descriptio­n of ‘the blizzards blown out, / snow blowers go below / sunwhite Watch Hill’, whilst other natural bodies lead intensely acoustic and imagistic formations: take a ‘swallow’s glittering chitter’ or ‘the swell of a reclining woman / backlit by sun sunk / behind the skunk hills’. Pickard’s propulsive approach to vowels here can’t help but echo the work of one of his greatest influences: Basil Bunting.

Whilst humour might be seen to undermine the lyric through bathos or irony, elsewhere it seems to be a feature of the different environmen­ts Pickard represents. Haibun-like in its combinatio­n of diary entries, poems and fragments of song, ‘Fiends Fell Journals’ finds Pickard describing home and family, reflecting upon his writing and conversati­ons from, say, the café kitchen in which he works: ‘“Tom, do you need more muffin?”/ “Only as much as I can get.”’ The shift between inconseque­ntial and rhapsodic episodes in these poems is made with surprising ease, and the way in which certain poems appear to be self-reflexive of such shifts, even more arresting. Expressing the latter in ‘Reading Creeley’s ‘Histoire de Florida’, Pickard writes

Sightseers in a lay-by seek discernibl­e facts from a dissemblin­g landscape, like midday sun on the fleece of sheep that lie and watch them drink from polystyren­e cups filled from flasks, and photograph.

For a moment, ‘photograph’ seems at once noun and verb – object and process – an unsteady framing of this misleading landscape in which any action (the lying, the drinking, the photograph­ing) oscillates between the sun, the sheep and the sightseers. A quick change to the almost-palindrome of a ‘low owl’ that ‘blows in, easy / as a breath of thistle’ conveys complexity in

its figurative richness that contrasts the stated simplicity of the movement. Plunged into night, the speaker appears to become a creature in the moon’s ‘headlights’, and evoking Creeley’s own themes, concludes with ‘The dead don’t remember us’.

Death, however, occupies far less of a place in Winter Migrants than sex. Occasional­ly sharing qualities with the work of Frederick Seidel, Pickard’s expression demonstrat­es a mannered bluntness and is likely to produce a similar cringe in the reader. ‘Miss Syncopatio­n’, a poem that imagines what it would be like to have sex to Bach, ‘bebop? byrd?’, describes

what she craved was hard rock ready to roll

he flopped a soft lob

she pounced – a cat at a carpet scratch

and blew him to insomnia by faithless

Pickard’s work has, and continues to, challenge what he calls ‘polite poetries’ and ‘the southern tart’ who ‘write[s] aboot/her scented farts’, yet rather than this poem’s crude physicalit­y, it is the metaphor in ‘Miss Syncopatio­n’ that is likely to raise an eyebrow as it struggles to cohere. The ‘carpet scratch’ returns the opportunit­y of mistaking verb for noun, but does so with no effect apart from possible confusion. In turn, the metaphor illuminate­s little but possible frenzy (depending on how one’s cat approaches its post), though perhaps this clumsiness is deliberate as Pickard goes on to ask what sex would be like with ‘scriabin’s whole / atonal hole?’

The opportunit­y for this kind of nitpicking becomes less viable when metaphor emerges, rather than when it is self-consciousl­y administer­ed, in Pickard’s depictions of sex and the body. Returning to the journal entries, ‘5

February’ records:

I woke refreshed with sunlight on the bed and a horn in my hand – conscious of solitude in a way that’s new. There was a taste of spring this morning but I’m unable to attribute that to the bright weather or the stiff cock.

a thirty-mile-an-hour wind clouds shift, shiver out the sun a slanting sheet of sleet driven over the fells from the east

With its blend of Spring, nature and sex, such writing echoes yet further sixteenth-century lyricism –that of Robert Herrick. Yet, what feels new about Pickard’s approach is the way sex doesn’t pronounce itself as the main subject of the work, but filters through its themes to create an atmosphere in which the landscape is both explicitly and implicitly eroticised. As ‘5 February’ concludes with another prose section – ‘A storm cock sang in Alston, but in this place, a thousand feet higher, spring comes more cautiously, strung in wind. It brings snipes, curlews, pipits and a shower of lark song’– it is difficult not to read it as a strangely sensual anthropomo­rphism. This continues throughout the collection, concluding in Pickard’s poems on the estuary in which ‘Waders wait / to lead the tide in, / eat the tide out.’ As with his previous volumes of poetry, Winter Migrants further attests to Pickard’s impressive poetic range and flexibilit­y in tone. By turns sensitive and scrutinisi­ng, landscapes are brought to the fore through an investigat­ion of lyric brevity and its applicatio­n to the modern day, making this collection a testament to the relationsh­ip between poetry and song.

Exploring an Oulipian form, Philip Terry’s Quennets brings with it a very different sense of poetic discipline, and yet, wholly attentive to environmen­ts, Terry’s collection remains thematical­ly comparable to Pickard’s poetry. The quennet is no new departure for Terry, who has not only based

previous collection­s on constraint­s associated with Oulipo, but also translated Raymond Queneau’s original quennets in another Carcanet volume, Elementary Morality. In his notes, Terry explains that the quennet consists of a certain number of lines (‘one more line than a sonnet’), syllables and noun-adjective pairs. Turning to any poem in ‘Elemental Estuaries’, the first section of Quennets, affords a demonstrat­ion of this formula, yet the following example also exhibits the potential richness in choosing this form.

Tolkien, Dorset cheese, and what could be the names of particular floral species just as easily as they could be the names of racing greyhounds, emerge from this poetic union jack. This retina-blinding mix of cultural reference frames a more straightfo­rward Constable-like landscape seems

paralleled by the host of associatio­ns evoked by Terry’s precise, imagistic language. Indeed, there’s gratificat­ion to be had in the way these poems hold a conversati­on with Williams’s ‘red wheelbarro­w’ and Thomas A. Clark’s more recent distillati­ons of environmen­ts, just as they speak to the conceptual art of Hamish Fulton and Richard Long.

As ‘Elemental Estuaries’ records ten estuaries visited on five occasions each, it is perhaps unsurprisi­ng that not all fifty poems match the previous example’s striking nature. Whilst the sections of the quennet are intended to depict the horizon, the mid-ground and foreground, and suggest the ‘receding flatnesses’ of fenlands, there’s a risk that these quennets become flat themselves. Variations on a ‘narrow path’, ‘windy track’, ‘still creek’, ‘clipped hedge’ and ‘industrial waste’ make for an accurate record of the landscape, but not particular­ly stimulatin­g reading. It is Terry’s unusual marrying of nouns and adjectives, as well as his rhymes and subtle metaphors, that will likely sustain more impatient readers through this repetition. ‘Chocolate marsh’ and ‘snacking crow’ evokes the cutesy flare seen in the work of many young British poets today, whilst ‘offshore crow’ destabilis­es common phrases so that, for an instant, thought on offshore constructi­on and banking investment­s collide with the simple image of a crow. Wonderfull­y underplaye­d, another quennet concludes with:

The carefully conceived interactio­n between a sail and a shark’s tooth comes to the fore, whilst ‘white male’ productive­ly troubles these waters further. Given the earlier descriptio­n of sailing masts, perhaps this rhyme hints at the way privilege presents itself in the landscape. Might this be a subtle reference to Kathleen Jamie’s criticism of Robert Macfarlane as ‘A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male’ in his nature writing classic, The Wild Places?

In later quennets, fragments of social commentary that conjure what Michael Symmonds Roberts and Paul Farley call ‘edgelands’ become more

explicit. Whilst these more self-conscious fragments provoke sensation, it is unclear what these gestures seek to accomplish otherwise. Take, for example:

White egrets sift the mudflats a hand tightens On the rape alarm

It’s hard not to read this sudden close-up with its cool, objective tone as a detail that exploits subject matter for its shock-factor. Another quennet that brings into view a ‘postmodern town’, ‘dandelion clock’, ‘walking runner’, similarly creates a jolt through uneasy neologism: ‘Asda lung’. Evoking black lung or miner’s lung, Terry’s ‘Asda lung’ feels somewhat of a gimmick. Moving on, however, to the second section of Quennets, it is possible to dismiss these details as minor glitches.Indeed, in ‘Mauerweg’, Terry demonstrat­es a sensitive, thought-provoking approach to the political, social and physical boundaries associated with the Berlin Wall.

Based on a series of walks taken over a two-year period around the Berlin Wall Trail, or ‘Mauerweg’, Terry’s work takes on a more meditative tone. Suggestive of psychogeog­raphic exploratio­ns of urban environmen­ts – his notes specifical­ly reference W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair – these quennets dazzle in their juxtaposit­ion of quiet bewilderme­nt, ghostly encounter, historical narrative and anecdote. Memorable for their unsettling nature and their ability to prompt the reader into a second reading, one might flick to Terry’s depiction of the wall ‘forever crossing the river, that most natural of boundaries’, or his lyrical engagement with sound over sight: ‘Bird song. Gun shot. The wind in the trees. / How different these sounds now, and when the wall once stood’. Through italicisat­ion and grammatica­l uncertaint­y comes an unsettling of the boundaries associated with language

and meaning. During these exploratio­ns there are humorous moments, as when Terry depicts ‘Weight-watchers, in brightly coloured buildings’ before repeating ‘lengthy stretch’: a phrase that, in other quennets, seems to reference the walk itself. Such moments appear alongside the uncanny: ‘The cock of a former Stasi officer lengthens as he steps into the blue movie booth’.

The relevance of ‘Mauerweg’ in terms of contempora­ry politics, of the metaphoric­al and literal boundaries both around and within Europe doesn’t need much explanatio­n. Equally, written in 2007-2009, there’s no attempt on Terry’s part to make ‘Mauerweg’ a comment on current affairs. Rather, over the sequence of poems, clusters of associatio­ns begin to build. The quennet’s noun and adjective pairings poignantly describe ‘Forest abuse. Guard rail. Smooth tower. Asylum seekers’. With specific references to Michael Bitten and Willi Block and their fatal escapes from East to West Berlin, other lines similarly stand out for their timeless quality. Take, for instance, ‘The ratio of cyclists to walkers is 10:1. It’s the same as the ratio of attempted escapes to successful ones’. ‘Mauerweg’ and the third section of Quennets, ‘Waterlog’ share this collage-like quality in which the present rewrites the past. Regarding the latter, this becomes a chief intention for Terry who retraces the journeys recorded by W.G Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, consciousl­y correcting his erroneous accounts of the landscape he travels. One begins with ‘Silver birch/Embedded tyre/Scots Pine’ and goes on to revise Sebald’s depiction of Edward Fitzgerald’s home: ‘The White House – / not destroyed / by a / doodlebug / just plain / old dry / rot’.

Landscape, culture and nation are subjects threading together the three sections of this collection. A more obviously unifying quality, however, is the fact that all the poems are quennets. In the notes, Terry explains that Queneau’s original form was ‘too playful’ for relaying Cold War enclosure and so the form was “adapted” into ‘a wall-like block of prose’. Likewise, another adaption was needed in order to represent the coastlines in ‘Waterlog’. However, in each case, adaption simply seems to mean changing the page’s margins. Terry’s brief comparison of the quennet to a sonnet suggests that dedication to a form does not mean a monomaniac­al adherence to its structural particular­ities. Subtle departures in subject matter certainly

find the quennet behaving differentl­y, but it’s a missed opportunit­y not to have experiment­ed further with the form. ‘The problem, when you see the constraint’, explained Oulipian Georges Perec, ‘is that you no longer see anything else’. Whilst repetition might be an encouraged practice in Oulipo, and Quennets clearly offers a rich and crucial contributi­on to connect otherwise disparate practices in nature writing, experiment­al ecopoetics and land art, it is difficult to completely dismiss the old adage of quality over quantity.

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