An Alternative Generation of Poets Pawing Over the Ancients Matthew Clegg
An Alternative Generation of Poets
Pawing Over the Ancients Matthew Clegg
Pound famously claimed the reason why he pawed over the ancients was to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do However, he goes on to affirm that even if we feel the same emotions as the ancients, we feel them through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations Andrew Duncans Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures (Waterloo Press, 2000) and Joseph Woods Sailing to Hokkaido (Worple Press, 2001) both seem to find accord with the ancients yet come at the nuances and intellectual gradations of their own moments. Duncans book feeds variously from the Prometheus myth, from ancient Chinese, from Dark Age English and cultures from the Inner Asian Steppes whereas Woods is mainly in dialogue with Japan.
It is the dialectic quality of Joseph Woods Sailing to Hokkaido that I find rewarding. Unlike Duncan, Woods places himself in his poems. In many he is a self-conscious pilgrim traveller, in conversation with demandingly different but enriching cultures (e.g. Japan, Sicily). The book bears an inscription from an 11th centaury poet, Judah ha-Levi which reads,
My heart is in the East
But I am in the farthest West,
How can I taste what I eat,
And how can food to me be sweet?
This prepares the tone of bittersweet longing and displacement for the poems that ensue. The strength of them lies so much in their alert poise to the subtlest nuances of melancholy nostalgia, present absorption and timeless epiphany. The poem Triptych is a cultural intersection where the poet is in dialogue with a monk. Section one focuses on food, section two the subtleties of climate and section three on the nuances lost across language itself.
- Things are lost because of my English, he says.
Because of my Japanese and my English
The poet replies. These poems are full of conscientious efforts toward precision. The title poem is informative. From a ship at sea in the night, it meditates on the imperceptible line where the darknesses of sky and sea and sky and land meet on the horizon. In instructs the reader to watch until they can make out the dividing lines, before informing them that
Tonight one darkness
overruns another
There is no line between
The modern world is suddenly thrust back in touch with the darkness where the consciousness itself first groped into life. The boundaries have broken down. It is a fascinating place for a book to start and reassures the reader that this is going to contain more then just the frisson of the exotic.
Gems and Detritus Maggie Hannan
Joseph Woods arrives on the list with many accomplishments a Patrick Kavanagh Award for best first collection, an MA in Creative Writing, and the directorship of Poetry Ireland.
Woods tone is distant, yet his writing has a striking grace and poise. The poems here describe his travels in Asia and often turn on a single thought or moment. He is difficult to quote from because of this. In Interview he writes,
I was made wait, and the mind
idles over distance. Somewhere,
a Chaos-butterfly is flapping
its wings. I have no ear
for diminutive beats, and this tremble
is perceptible to the eye only.
And it seems a good introduction to his poetics. At once Spartan and strangely rich, Woods approach is deceptively simple. His poetry is very visual and he conveys an accurately the travellers or strangers sensibility; his eye seems to seek out and isolate the strange and the familiar, without ever quite owning the places or the objects he describes. What makes his work unusual is that Woods overcomes the problems of writing about an unfamiliar place by placing himself nowhere, adrift, and almost weightless. This is a contemplative poetry lost in a daydream and a pure pleasure to read.
