the clarity of distant things by Jane Duran. Carcanet (Manchester 2021) Pbk 103 pages. £11.99.
Jane Duran was born in Cuba and raised in the USA and Chile. Her father was a comandante in the Spanish Republican army in the Civil War, her husband is Algerian, and the different strands of her heritages have informed her writing. She won the prestigious Forward Prize for her first collection, has a Cholmondeley Award and two subsequent collections were Poetry Book Society recommendations. The latest book comprises two poem sequences, the first weaving together the life and ‘grid-lines’ paintings of Agnes Martin’s paintings, and the second the art and artefacts of Islamic Iberia.
Both sequences are examples of ekphrastic poetry, engaging with painting and other artistic forms. Such writing may be descriptive or mimetic or use the subject as a starting point for more abstract explorations. In each section of this book Duran skilfully evokes her originals and draws from them their unique typography and culture in her own distinctive spare style. Her simple couplets suggest the square canvasses and grids of Martin’s work, enclosing objects which fade into mere traces or emerge unexpectedly from the formal strictures.
Martin was born in Saskatchewan and moved to New Mexico via New York. Duran plays with the big skies and vast spaces of plains and deserts and the stretched white of the artist’s canvases. In the title poem the wind brings her a distant house, a train halted on the horizon, each ‘true in miniature’ since ‘nowhere is far anymore’. In ‘Friendship 1963’ Duran imagines the grids, gold leaf on gesso, which is represented on the cover of her book, as windows in an urban landscape, each having a distinct story.
The perspective of Martin’s art, through the prism of Duran’s verse, allows both distant objects and immediate ones to be present in time and in space. So in ‘Night Sea 1963’ the flaws and distortions of the canvas suggest the details of surface reflections but only when you stand back does the grid disappear and ‘there is only night sea, opaque’. In ‘The Peach 1964’ the fruit ‘bit into’ is gone but ‘gave back’ through the stark grids its evocation of a living origin – ‘orchard after orchard’. This ‘rejoicing grid’ is something which she finds in ‘On a Clear Day’ as being there all along and is a celebration of ‘thisness’ here with the poet/artist ‘under everything I see / whenever I can // wherever I happen to be’.
The second sequence ‘Miniatures of Al-Andalus’ is a series of ‘glimpses’ of seven centuries of Muslim culture in Iberia, largely through its art and artefacts. Duran plays again with the idea of enclosure, both in the miniature paintings, in their depiction of enclosed spaces such as gardens, and in objects like bottles and bowls. This is the opposite end of the telescope to the emptiness of prairie and desert but again there are reflections on the ability of art to evoke vastness, plenitude and time.
So in ‘To Paint the Clamour’ ‘even seven horsemen will do to represent a multitudinous army’ riding ‘shoulder to shoulder / beard to beard’. ‘Painted Bowl from Medina Elvira’ wonders at the artist who can depict a bird guiding a horse ‘simply by holding a thread in its beak’ and at the affinity the artist found between bird and horse. Affinity, too, is portrayed between people of the different Abrahamic religions.
This is particularly evident in ‘Cordoba’, both in their respective gardens representing the ‘inner man’ and publicly in the ‘radial encounters’ in the sunlight of streets and markets through ‘a glance, a warm greeting’. Continuity and heritage are the themes of the last poem of the book, ‘Red Earth’ where landscapes, geology, habitation and artefacts are all pulled together as the poet runs soil through her fingers, ‘the idea of staying, a grant of earth // the earth I interrupt now with my hands’.
Duran’s style realises complexity in the simplest and sparest manner, using words extremely sparsely, without punctuation and with an amount of white space which turns a page into a canvas or a piece of experimental music to be savoured slowly. As she says in ‘Brass Astrolabe’ ‘to read brevity / you need patience // meticulous time’. These poems are certainly worth that effort.