Relic Environments Trilogy: Introduction

To Think of Time 

The original titles in this edition, Relic Environments, Available Light, and Designs for Living, were published as independent collections by Cinnamon Press between 2005 and 2008.

Previously, in Blackwater Quartet (Kittiwake Editions 2005), I had explored mechanisms whereby phenomena of memory could be introduced into quasi-historical contexts. From them, a metaphorical lineage can be realised in the later adaptations of 9th century Chinese poems, the oppressive yet liberating Chernobyl narratives, and the Trilogy’s concluding cache of folk tales that acknowledges the ‘common memory’ represented therein, while seeking to embrace more fully the subtext of violence and estrangement pervading the poems, adding dimension to the characters, and allowing the reader to test the limits of the Modern in that context.

The Trilogy begins with a mirrored image. Despite the priest’s warning, the character ‘Il Giornale’ looks into the glass: ‘The membrane writhed, distorted where the verses/Pressed forward…’ He is the Promethean stooge, through which a paradox is resolved. The mirrored image is his own, skewed to reveal a darker self that is born ‘Wrangling through silver’ into our world, ‘the burst sacs/Pooling in the carpet spirals//A wobbly first-step…//Quicker as the page was turned’. The priest’s admonishment that ‘The mirror must be covered’ recommends itself to a priori knowledge, a prediction that recognises the cycles of fitful identity recovered at great cost. Time is everywhere and nowhere, where the dormant self within the glass has only to be observed to gain release.

The theme is re-examined in Book II, in “A Face”, where a physical mask, the face of the dead, replaces a damaged identity – ‘behind each breath/the greasy ellipsis of self-doubt’. The assumption of a new face as new identity informs the living and the dead alike.
 
The man you were, the face in the mirror:

there you are.

Here I am.

However, it is in “A Mask of Mirrors”, in Book III, where these paradoxes are examined at length, through a complex narrative and with characters percolating with primitive energy. The Self is votive. It becomes what it is required to be, both corrupt and incorruptible. In the opening lines, Snow White’s Mother dies in childbirth, but not before she has first looked upon her child.

So pale, my love, your rosebud mouth

so small, and dark curls black as ravens.

But these were her last words….

Already the cheeks had sunken, and the bedbugs

crawled out of her hair, dank

with sweat from the killing birth.

In contrast, the dead Queen’s sister directs her wiles towards the King, who takes her as his new Queen. Her jealousy of Snow White, however, seeps into every cooking pot and cranny of the castle, consuming her.

The ‘mirror point’ is first suggested when the Queen, having forced the King to sacrifice his daughter, gluts on Snow White’s body parts as reward, thus reflecting her own consuming rage. As we find, the sacrifice is a ruse, the Queen duped into dining on suckling-pig parts, secretly slaughtered for the occasion.

The Queen’s old servant has made an appearance in previous stanzas. The character hovers between worlds, sometimes a mechanical to drive the narrative, observed using her arts to stuptify or kill (‘The old servant woman was good with herbs’), and at other times freely shape-shifting – ‘Outside, across the mossy roof,/the shadow of a bird…’ It is she who makes possible the mirror-plane of water to reveal the charmed fish.
 
The old servant

sprinkled a few herbs on the water

and the fish surfaced for a nibble.

But the herbs were powerful, and made the well water

clear as silvered glass, and the fish

speak.

Through a series of subversions and transformations, the Queen encounters herself as mirror-image of her own mother, a duality within a reflection, and further, locked in a cycle of polarities with Snow White, who though lost within the deep forest, demonstrates a penchant for physical sacrifice that ends ultimately in her own death. Here the paradox concludes, with echoes of Christian ceremony salted with elements of pagan ritual. Snow White dies to live again, while her nemesis, the Stepmother-Queen, hears all she commands from her mirror-fish: hears, but does not listen.

But the fish, unused to speaking, mumbled

something the Queen just missed,

except the last words

bubbling on the surface…Snow White…

The direction of Snow White’s afterlife, her life reborn, is not to that of public works, certainly not as demonstrated in the closing lines of the poem, where the Stepmother-Queen, not recognising Snow White after so many years – false reflection having robbed her of her ability to identify – dances to death in red-hot shoes thoughtfully provided by Snow White, who, awakened from the dream of life and death, its trickster duality, ‘(turned) her cold blue eyes along that company,/rose, and left the hall.’

These principal contextual threads reappear in other poems, albeit with more subtlety, with the thematic references seemingly more off-hand. In the first movement of “Tales of Wood and Iron”, in the Animus section of Book III, the dichotomy representing both the natural or supra-natural is expressed with a philosophical languor that offers no warning of the challenges that follow.

Night and day, for all God’s children, the same star

dawn to dreaming, a little breath between

light’s constancy

and the cold dark.

As well as introducing the sequence, the quatrain serves to establish the Poetic Identity implicit in the narration of tales whose archetypal population of dupes, dreamers, and disembowellers contrasts sharply with lives which occupy historical space and time. The personal immediacy of “The House”, in Book III, obliges the reader to assume the role of confidante, to witness ‘In the fires of this last evening//…the insinuations of goodbye’. Again, we are ‘…flying through the mirror/we made, that is made, somehow/of our being here.’ Again, there is the hard choice to categorise the object as either heirloom,

…Pickwick Papers, the edition

loose in its binding, ruby leather crumbled

…

…my father’s paintings, his primitive style

now stylish...


or as recalcitrant discard consigned to fire or ‘mortal damp’.

The degree of balance required to maintain the equilibrium of the poem as a technical device, and the stylistic requirements that contribute to a poem’s meaning, in the sense that it is comprehended by a reader on multiple levels, is dependent directly on the poet’s ability to remain coherent across an equal number of levels and still retain the ability to surprise, interest, or confound.

In “The Journeyman’s Tale”, a series of semi-autobiographical episodes is arranged within a mannered sequence à la Henry Fielding, while the Chaucerian leitmotif accommodates, arguably, a more contemporary personality.

In “Field Notes”, the life of the frontiersman Daniel Boone is recorded ‘…in blood, and in hard days without number’. Boone is the outsider, ‘walking west/To Red River and the wilderness beyond’, following ‘Centuries of trails to the deep woods’, but we recognise, too, the savage equal to incidents of ‘…gristle hank of hair/The Indian blade hacked through’. We see him drag across his face, ‘a war-paint ash/A death-devotion’ and understand that the savage-among-the-savages will too be consigned to history with the warrior tribes he faced, ‘Forgotten in those generations’. Yet, we are reminded that the circle is unbroken, in the closing lines, where, with tourists gathering to eat ice cream, once, ‘The peeled corpse swelled yellow in the sun’.

A tangential theme is explored in “Paladin”, in Book III. The motorcycle daredevil ‘Evel’ Knievel, like Boone, an out-rider to his contemporaries, is addressed as one whose nature is Nature itself.

This is the future without us, instead

Of time, a border bound by all the dead

…

Past the crust of galaxies

Where the gods were

Through a series of extreme physical challenges, his name, his identity, is subordinated into the collective will of society. Through him, the Crowd escapes itself, its self-loathing. With each ‘show’ of incident, Evel risks fracture and immolation, yet such sacrifices offer inherent protection to the community from,

A prophecy of dead stars, moving

As a creature moves, calling into the silence

He is Christ in rhinestones, mocked and revered in equal measure, his life a glimpse of a nirvana beyond the parking lots, dud cheques, and fast-food joints, beyond ‘Each whispered failure’.

In Book II, a new wilderness and new sacrifices: Chernobyl. In a remarkable series of poems, the Russian poet Lyubov Sirota recorded her experiences of April 26, 1986, when she and thousands of other citizens of Soviet Ukraine became victims of the most singular, recorded nuclear incident since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Following my treatments of poems by the 9th century Chinese poet Yu Xuanji, under the series title, “Revelations of a Lesser Wife” and their subsequent publication in Book I of the Trilogy, I was interested in other equally intensely personal ‘diary’ poems that might be adapted from other sources. I discovered the Sirota series without recommendation, and largely by accident. Eventually, I made contact with her, and we corresponded for a period of months. I adapted her poems from a previous English-language version, but without the use of original titles, preferring instead to weave stanzas of poetry through passages of statistical reportage.

It is assumed incorrectly that the opening lines are Sirota’s, but in fact they serve as a stylistic primer for the poetry that followed. The aim was to incorporate elements of prelude, reminiscence, and ennui, using images loosely linked.

North from Kiev, empty roads…

The light of other summers opens

among the pages. In the photograph, your face,

fragile as pink shells washed along the beach;

the light moves, your face more

the face of my memory,

not the face I knew, your image clouding over,

a shadow across these chapters.
 
The Suite’s three movements follow the historical sequence of events, from the hours and minutes prior to the explosion, through the desperate attempts to contain the radiation at the reactor site, finally to the aftermath, where a perspective to the events is achieved through personal, transcendent poetry.

Our time in Hell prepares us. We have seen

the dead bolt through abandoned streets.

We have seen ourselves, running.

Prophets, we have cured ourselves.

Through your carelessness, we are gods.
…

The lateness of this season

came to us suddenly.

Dazed, we understood everything.

In “Resurrection Suite”, and “Revelations of a Lesser Wife” the voices of two independent poets are bullied into English, beyond the recorded experiences. My own limitations with Russian and Chinese languages pre-empted any attempt at formal academic translations. However, trusting my own instincts for the poetry, and more specifically the poetry-writers themselves, the scope was provided to interpret these guiding spirits of the poems. In Yu Xuanji’s “To Secretary Liu”, the poet reflects on the aftermath of civil war.

I set aside my writing materials as verses appear

From nowhere

The characters rise off the parchment

Bright fish

Scattered images on water 


In “Reflections in Late Spring”, she contemplates lost love.


I am adrift in my poems, one by one

I watch them

Floating up through the pines


In contrast, Sirota’s poems were emblematic of apocalypse.


Our dreams are on fire, and in this fire the branches

sway gently, and we, without a champion

except towards morning the stars,

bright battalions of them, falling on pavements

until the hour passes,

and even dreams are abandoned.


We stare into the windows of nameless places,

into crazed, deep cold

we know means goodbye.

In the cases of both poets, personal ambition is restricted by class and gender, or subject to overriding political will. Yu Xuanji, at ‘the posting of the Civil Service examination results’, pines,

Who could recognise my poems, cloaked so

In gaudy folds

I stand on tiptoe with the women

Just glimpsing brightness named 


Sirota’s poems, in contrast, seethe with indignation.


The ministers blame us, we

who are made ciphers, we who

would not lower ourselves

to the burning brand: radiophobia.

What do you suggest, that we

accept your world, its forms,

its promises of reform? You need

your eyes tested.

Samuel Johnson wrote of ‘… our speech copious without order… energetick without rules….’ It is this same energy that I have applied to these poem sequences, and while these versions of the poems are openly interpretative, and while there may be failings in respect of objective translation criteria, the poetic process is valid, I believe, where the resulting body of work is circumspective in its artifice, and supports the dignity of the writer in the poem’s first blood, where events are channelled into those breathless, redemptive moments we recognise as poetry.

There are other instances in ‘the lives of the poets’, where the poems provide forums - for metaphysical debate, for example, where, as for John Donne,

The years are the cause

It is in the teeth

Full in the teeth the language goes

Announcing his sorrow…

or in contemplative resignation, as for John Clare, his book ‘of seasons/and weathers, …a mighty pretty thing…/upon it a name/some said was mine.’ A grave-robber plunders John Milton’s tomb, only to find that in touching ‘a length of auburn hair wherein it is said/his genius lay, that of its keeping/I too might hope for immortality’, he too is transformed. Charles Lamb is carried home drunk by friends, waking the neighbours with his singing, thinking ‘…we lost our time, looking what the time was.’ Coleridge leaves behind ‘…forty thousand treatises in metaphysical critique, none complete …’, while Byron reflects on a new love , ‘… a girl of twenty, like Caroline/but not so savage’, and Yeats, reflecting on the failed rebellion of 1916, remarks, “‘I am far from Innisfree and the Salley Gardens.’” Catullus, the ‘Idler’, reveals a complexity of character at odds with the bawdy poems, where sublimated love and filial devotion serve as touchstones to a wistful desire to return to his home in Sirmione, ‘…at last the journey/Ended, among our own gods’.

I commented earlier on poetry’s power as a catalyst, and noted particular themes in “The House”, as a ‘tableaux of personal memory’.

Often, the poetic impulse manifests itself through personal experience, and poets are sometimes criticised for their grinding self-absorption. There are notable exceptions, of course, where the individual voice is representative of a wider humanity, and the level of accountability to this wider representation can be measured against the age and experience of the poet. At sixty, we are less like Dylan Thomas’s ‘boys of summer’ than we are Yeats’s Crazy Jane, who has found ‘something worse to meditate on’.

The “Almanac” series is autobiographical, more openly, and more directly so, than any other poems in the Trilogy. The section begins with a waif’s tug at the reader’s sleeve, ‘I was ill/and nearly died…’, before countering to the fixed perspective, ‘That was in 1965…’, delineating then into a complex pattern of childhood recollections that lead the reader from the child’s sickbed to the planet Mars, where ‘….we became ourselves, the way a name/is recalled/beyond the sunburst launch and hieroglyph of rocket trails….’ Here, the ‘we’ is at once the child - retained in the man’s mind as a distant yet evocative energy - yet also the man himself, who recognises time’s malleability within both the pristine technology of ‘weather-models binding hemispheres’, and the child’s ‘lost world/floating in the dark’.

In “Nones”, the narrative I subjugates personal loss, the father’s death, into ‘…careful poems set-out, scratched through’ where ‘a cat’s-cradle of sonnets/suspended the world, that world’, and the cold room and a winter world without, reflecting emotional suspension within family grief.

…I knew

what held, what threaded silences together.

In “Yellow”, the poetry has become an accepted routine, where the young poet finds his way, eventually, to the small-town radio station to read a poem, ‘or maybe two’, the sultry summer of the American South providing prior distraction in the form of ‘Sweet Sixteen’, who wipes ‘a sweat bead slow along her throat’, the poetry, it appears, no match for the heat and damp of ‘…a brief and incandescent beauty.’

“The Sky at Night”, the first poem written in this group, was also its bellwether. A ‘heat shimmer’ of memory prickles, unreliable as a true measure of image or distance, ‘flanked/in ditch weed’, ‘a museum piece/of frontiers and flags of tribes’ (the latter reference itself a ‘glass-cased’ reflection in the ‘high, heavy mahogany’ of the previous poem, “Curves of Pursuit”). Through the haze, we see rise a childhood memory of the fun-fair, of ‘garish animals/locked in circling music’, a realisation of past and present as indissoluble.

…the riders,

Dad and I, paired in fixed canter

to a puffing calliope.


He, dead these forty years,

and younger then than I am now.

The existential swathe cut by Orion across the night sky reveals the same cold light of “Nones”.

The vignettes of “A Month in the Country” represent a family album. Each generation spirals into the next, with a collective, familial integrity, ‘from the well’s cool depth,/ memory…’; the golden ring is recovered, but the solace such a bequest might otherwise represent, is tempered by the knowledge that the initials and dates of individual lives have been in part sacrificed in its repair.

Dualities and polarities have been discussed previously, as ensigns signalling levels of complexity in the poems. The morphology of spiritual election, the use of personae as initiatory masks, the persistence of archetypes and archaic realities, too, serve the cause, conversely at times, where their universality as structural devices can be directed either to disrupt or to reinforce the mean. And while it was never the intention that these general remarks should provide an exhaustive critique of every poem in this edition, I have attempted to evaluate, and share, my understanding of aspects of my own poetry-writing, with the proviso that in the making of poems it is acknowledged that Instinct necessarily supersedes any exegesis one may attempt in terms of defining one’s own motives as a writer.

Reading these poems again, and having taken the opportunity afforded to me to reflect on the collective, connective strengths of the verse, I hope that I have not become like the old soldier, who after yet another retelling of his war stories, reflected, The older I get, the braver I was. The revisions I have made to the texts of the three original publications in this series have been undertaken only where I believe the writing would benefit circumspectly, and where the native swagger of the poems would not otherwise be compromised.

The definition of a relic environment is as diverse as any poem here; it is the table under bamboo eaves, or the reactor’s blasted shell, or the Mandelbrot set of an elaborate tattoo. It is the forest path. It is both momentum and stillness. It is this sentence, closing now forever to present time – for you, the reader, forever, a time recalled.