To mimic something Dr Johnson was about to say, there are two kinds of poet: those of use to us, and those who are not. To say this is not to attack modernism: arguably, that alleged (alleged, because so misunderstood) triumph of modernism The Wasteland is more affirmative than the lacklustre ‘Georgianism’ it displaced. It leads ‘to fragments ..shored against ruins..’ through moments of extreme perception, and the hallucinating sublime.
The issue has to be with the post-modernism that came after, the spiritual decadence of Ashberry, the essential futility of Frank O’Hara, the waste of space in John Kinsella and the even greater futility of all those who thought it terribly clever to evolve pointlessness, were that possible. Mark Ford’s Soft Sift loops the loop in exploring vacancy, the book a paradigm of literary decadence, of the exhausted spirit with nowhere to go.
As an enthusiast for Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the towering oil paintings of the great Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804 to 1887) and the mystical, Nordic aphorism-lyrics of the celebrated Ostrobothnian quasi-separatist Gosta Agren, I approached Wycherley’s North Flight with some excitement. She sounded like a poet who had gone somewhere. Having myself travelled in Sweden, Norway and over Iceland, I knew her destination to be worthwhile, a potential ‘cleansing of the spirit’. Her book is indeed a spiritual progress, a journey from her native ‘Fens’ dark gift’ to Shetland and Iceland. It is journey in which someone met can say: ‘I must leave one self/and raise another’. Wycherley wants to travel: ‘as north as north can go,…where land must end/ and the ultimate begins,/ glass chasing glass’– from lines written near the last lighthouse, Shetland. ‘It burns in me now –/one diamond/ held against death.’ Whilst one poem iii winterland is almost conventionally prescriptive in lines Agren might have written: ‘we step from our moulds,/skin-tight roles, to face/space, light, silence, / a landscape grown/ as large and strange as love.’ the fascination in the work is how different Wycherley is from Agren. For a poetry standing at the edge, meshing with the absolute, confronting the ultimate, as every voyager that far north must, it is strangely detailed, oddly serrated in a way and ‘shot with fire, teethed with ice’. This is her crystalline marvel, the image-perfect detail that prevents her work from being mere travel poetry, or the kind of droll Novia Scotia-bound ‘narratives’ ever in search of an elusive symbolism that you find in Elizabeth Bishop. With Bishop, the fate of detail always hangs in the balance, undecided, stale often, and thus ultimately very irritating.
In Wycherley, each fine detail is a fresh apprehension, a keen moment of perception. The last poem returns to where ‘the fen drags round us’. I did not want to go back. Overall, the movement in the book is of an enervating struggle for the ultimate; you keep on getting a sharp sense of seeing the sun or eternity through a grain of ice, or of being at ‘the snow-drift edge’ with ‘each grain a chalice/ to catch the sun’ in a Nordic version of Blake’s discovery of eternity in a grain of sand. The power in all the detail is cumulative. I never found it to be repetitive, or clutter before a sublime moment like ‘A longship burning, /journeying west. Sailing off the edge of the world.’ On the book cover is a stunning photograph of Arnason’s ‘Sun Voyager’, a steel sculpture abstract skeleton of a longboat by the harbour in Reykjavik and the subject of the penultimate poem, a climactic vision: ‘its prow points north/ into night, nil, the vanishing’. Wycherley’s astonishing poem does need to be quoted as spaced: and I see tines, tongues, andirons. Actinium trees reaching for stars the arctic absolutes.
Icebeak, ironfin, firebone.
To taste it is to be honed.
The last line serves to speak for the experience of reading her book. The clean lines of her poem stand in stark contrast to Heaney’s limp complaint in North: ‘ I faced the unmagical/ invitations of Iceland’. His poem’s lack of any sense of lived engagement is mirrored by the ‘rusting’ four line mini-stanzas and a fusty air of general boredom. His book never really feels like a journey to freshened perception, which Wycherley’s invariably does. A sense of seeing anew is much helped by her technical skills. Each ‘stanza’ or laying out is always shapely; every line seems to make a satisfying unit of sound and end ‘stressed’, to give a sense of a perception completed. Her clean music uses the full range of the language, balancing consonants and vowels with clear tact.
ChristopherTruman has been evolving a series of Zen-based black and white laser prints,some of which have been used in Sofia.Some counterpoint his poetry.
Reviewed work: Lynne Wycherley, North Flight (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2006), £8.95, ISBN 9781904863039