Eight centuries of dizzying wordplay

From medieval mystics to the Pendle witch trials, past and present collide in a timeless poetic debut

96pp, Faber, T £10.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£12.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

If there’s one art form which ought to be proudly out of step with the zeitgeist it is poetry. I might go further and call this a duty: stripped of commercial concerns, poetry is at its best when it pursues the artist’s vision as idiosyncratically as possible. Still, in debates about the state of poetry, we often hear from a loud faction of authoritarian formalists who are only happy when attacking contemporary verse for its lack of discipline or metric principle, even while their own work tends towards moralistic doggerel. It’s refreshing, then, to encounter in Camille Ralphs a boldly formalist technician whose poetry is innovative, whose phrasing sings. Ralphs is exceptionally skilled in prosody, but it’s worn lightly, or outweighed by an urgent artistry.

It’s a rare debut collection today that dares to be difficult, to be theologically complex, to be theological at all. Yet After You Were, I Am showcases an ambition, seriousness and wit that make it strangely timeless – one feels it could have been published in any era and be worthy of a readership.

Its first section, “Book of Common Prayers”, rewrites canonical devotions from sources as diverse as Job, St Augustine and Rumi, and does so with a rare panache and integrity. A poem titled “after Mechthild of Magdeburg” takes off from the 13th-century German mystic’s rhapsodic ode to the Almighty, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more seamless and beautiful combination of neologism and anachronism:

O arch as high as Maslow’s hierarchy, O I-wide-eye, surround-soundness of oh what’s happened this time, yet O timeless bigtime, day that lasts forever and a day,

O, you, beforehand of all

forehands

I’m in awe of the effect, not so much a collage as an entirely new creation in reaction to the old.

What sets this work apart is that Ralphs manages to be irreverent and reverent at the same time; alive ‘Day that lasts forever and a day’: poet and critic Camille Ralphs

to the fact that we can’t really have one without the other. If the wordplay is something of a motif it never becomes tired – and wordplay was, after all, good enough for the Metaphysicals. For Ralphs, a pattern of speech is a pattern of thought is a pattern of being. Her poems crack words open, spoonerising and subverting our proverbs and buzzphrases to ask: what are we really saying? A careful and stricken theology emerges, perhaps best summed up in “after St Francis of Assisi”: “cursed are we who know it’s hard to save the world from everyone who wants to save the world.”

The middle section, “Malkin”, dramatises the 1612 Pendle witch trials in a series of lyrical monologues. The narrative of condemnation and murder by the state comes through in terrifying fragments of speeches under duress, with period-appropriate inconsistencies of spelling and syntax, a wild language yet to crystallise:

I felt the valleys shrunc to gutters

cloggd wth sky I saw a hare uneating

embers in th tumbledown of darck and

the rains spalling the Heavens as I stolle a littl lamb

It’s impeccably researched, and avoids familiar territory or historical cosplay in favour of a layered, linguistic intensity. “Malkin” is about rumour, calumny, the exploitation of the weak to curry favour with the whims of those in power. Ralphs doesn’t point out crass parallels in our own time, and doesn’t need to: the voices of the dead (all of our voices, in time) persist in our supposedly rational age. We cannot deny our place in historical atrocities because they’re part of why we’re here; they’re in our dictionaries, our language, our thought. “Oh what’s happened this time”, indeed.

The collection concludes with “My Word”, a jaw-dropping evocation of Dr John Dee, chief astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, drawing on his own “spiritual diary” of his somewhat quixotic mission to discover the true Word. Again, this is challenging stuff (I expect the most erudite reader will still be thankful for the notes), but intellectually generous enough to show us a good time in recreating an era of gravely serious magic, when metaphysical ambition had a place in the civil service: “he who knew annihilation’s knothing, in a daisy is the daye’s eye, / flattened”. It’s impossible to do it justice in less than a dissertation, but – as with this whole collection – I expect to be re-reading it for years to come.

A jaw-dropping sequence revives John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court astronomer