Modern Brazilian Sonnets: Paulo Henriques Britto’s Forms of Nothing

By Rob Packer

Formas do nada by Paulo Henriques Britto

A constant in all (?) European literatures, the sonnet has a long pedigree in Portuguese, ranging from love sonnets by Camões, the language’s equivalent to Shakespeare, Cervantes or Goethe, right down to twentieth-century Brazilian poets, such as Vinícius de Moraes or Mario Quintana. In his collection from March this year, Formas do nada (Forms of Nothing, no English translation), Paulo Henriques Britto, one of Brazil’s leading poets, returns to the form throughout, exploring in half the collection’s poems the sonnet’s Petrarchan, Shakespearean and unrhymed forms, as well as reaching into more unconventional combinations (5-4-3-2, 5-5-4 and the like).

It soon becomes clear how apt the title is: the Forms are specifically poetic in their most traditional and rhyming guise and it is clear that Nothing refers to the subject matter. The first poem is ‘Lorem ipsum’, named after the placeholder text, featured in PowerPoint or WordPress that’s really a nonsense version of text by Cicero. Britto, who is also a translator, includes a “self-translation”, where the speaker promises poetic fireworks:

Father Tyne: ‘On the Toon’ by Sean O’Brien

By Rob Packer

November by Sean O’Brien

Is there a trend towards epic in contemporary British poetry? Maybe it’s just my taste (or my local library’s, or prize judges’) that some of my favourite recent poetry collections are or include longish poems with clear epic influences: even stranger is that all of them came out this year and last. There’s been ‘Elsewhere’ in David Harsent’s excellent Night; the incomparable Alice Oswald’s reworking of the Iliad in Memorial (and her 2002 Dart); ‘The Fair Chase’ starting John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone (I won’t have time to write more about that collection unfortunately: it’s very good though); Simon Armitage’s adaptation of The Death of King Arthur (I didn’t enjoy this one so much and found it bathetic in parts: if you haven’t read Armitage before—and you should—, start with Kid, Seeing Stars or his Sir Gawain); and ‘On the Toon’ which closes Sean O’Brien’s November.

Too Much Information: W. B. Yeats and Kebabs

By Rob Packer

Etymology is generally considered to be one of those unalloyed “good things”: after all, a lot of people like to use it to show how erudite they are (by using words like erudite, for example, when poncy will do). And when you’re growing up, it really is useful to remember that the horizon isn’t vertical. It’s also particularly helpful when learning languages: for example, vocabulary lists really are easier when you realize that a Spanish propuesta or desayuno is really an English proposal or breakfast from a different angle and that Vergangenheit and Zukunft in German really mean time that’s “gone for good” and “to come”. These aides-memoires do have a habit of ending up a little inane, though, and I’ll never forget being told by my school Russian teacher about the similarity between zavtra (tomorrow) and zavtrak (breakfast)—but it did the job and have used it most recently in Kyrgyzstan.

Sometimes, however, etymology sits within a word like a stink bomb, ready to explode at the rustle of a dictionary’s page. Nervous readers should look away now: there is half a chance I’ll ruin one of the English language’s greatest poems.

If You Go Down in the Woods Today: Clare Pollard’s “Changeling”

Changeling by Clare Pollard

The legend of the changeling reaches back into British folk history and imagines fairies or elves abducting babies to the Elf Hills, substituting them for changelings. The tale is, perhaps, increasingly forgotten but still haunting, and it is this and other parts of deep British folklore that form the basis of Clare Pollard’s Changeling, full of poems that feel, explicitly or implicitly, on a knife edge—between the wild and the city, between North and South, between ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

There is a tense, uneasy liminality from the excellent opening poem, ‘Tam Lin’s Wife’, which starts with a couple receiving some bad medical news, but quickly turns as the wife desperately hangs onto her (werewolf?) husband as he shape-shifts in her arms. A more enticing version of this transformative tension appears in two poems influenced by the Pendle Witches, the infamous story of ten people hanged for witchcraft in Pollard’s native Lancashire in 1612. ‘Pendle’ gigs into the accuser’s mind with a refrain that insistently repeats “then someone is to blame”, underlining humanity’s need to look for scapegoats, rather than accepting responsibility and one’s misfortunes: “When your children curdle like milk & turn one by one to clay dolls, / & your husband’s fledgling-weak & you’re a good Christian woman, / then someone is to blame.” The following poem, the ballad ‘The Confession of Alizon Device’, tells of a girl who—seemingly for the hell of it—has sex with the Devil, makes a pedlar lame and concludes with: “And you ask me, do I feel shame? / Well no, sir, that’s what creatures do. / It was the moment of my life / to hurt things too.” Taken together, both are morally difficult and feel tabloid-sensation contemporary, even though they are rooted in a 400-year-old history.

Even in less dramatic poems, whether it’s the unease of being an outsider or in danger, something bubbles away beneath the surface: the Lancashire girl escaped to London “spurning your lips and lads / for libraries and la-di-dah”;  a poet and putative gang member passing each other on an East London street but really in different cities with different geographies; or the girl who has forgotten flower names to replace them with names for styles of shoe and consumer culture with its guilt and its “not enough”.

The poems often ask “who am I?” but offer no solutions. I often felt there was a yearning for a more innocent age, but it is the poems with influences from folklore, ballads, the Arthur legend or Ovid, that are the least comforting, the most violent (often sexually) and most of all, the stuff of nightmares.

What makes Changeling so enjoyable, though, is Pollard’s talent for simile and metaphor: sunflowers “lean against the wall, / like lads behind a bike-shed for a smoke”; “Whirlpools of gulls [that] whip over the harbour” in Whitby, which is, if you’ve ever been there, exactly what it’s like; and Pollard identifies “that Esperanto of want and need: / Selfridges, mojitos, latte, weed”. My favourite metaphor, though, describes a caravan you maybe can’t afford on the Yorkshire moors with “the chill wind blasting away our mortgage”. It encapsulates the collection, as the pressure to conform and be conventional confronts nature’s promise of excitement and escape. But nature is not benign in Changeling: it menaces, it threatens, and can do permanent damage.

Clare Pollard, Changeling, Bloodaxe 2011

Attention to Detail: Reading with Distractions

By Rob Packer

I made a stop at The South Kensington Bookshop (lots of good deals) coming back from central London last week. I picked up a hardback, half-price copy of Derek Walcott’s Selected Poems, then squeezed myself into a crowded tube towards Richmond. As I struggled against falling over, I took out the book and flicked through a few pages at random, before coming across ‘The Light of the World’ from his 1987 collection The Arkansas Testament.

I am, probably like most people, not a good reader standing on the tube: people push past to get in and out; you stagger forwards as the train brakes and backwards as it accelerates; the station announcements intrude. With the precision, rhythm and language of poetry, it’s even worse and the smallest disturbance can stop you up or set your eyes reading words with a brain too distracted to listen.

As the District Line train swayed its way through Earl’s Court and Hammersmith, the poem somehow took me from the doorway where I was wedged to another vehicle at sundown, this time a minibus back from market day on Walcott’s native St Lucia:

Marley was rocking on the transport’s stereo
and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly.
I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek
streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait
you’d leave the highlights for last, these lights
silkened her black skin; I’d have put in an earring,
something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she
wore no jewelry. I imagined a powerful and sweet
odour coming from her, as from a still panther,
and the head was nothing else but heraldic.
When she looked at me, then away from me politely
because any staring at strangers is impolite,
it was like a statue, like a black Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People, the gently bulging
whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth,
the heft of the torso solid, and a woman’s,
but gradually even that was going in the dusk,
except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek,
and I thought, O Beauty, you are the light of the world!

The poem continues for another eight stanzas and between the stops and starts of the train, it felt like it took the whole journey to read, but it was also so gripping that I barely noticed all the tube’s other distractions. It’s some feat of writing.

When I got back home, I noticed this attention to detail. Look at the colours:

My thoughts on Derek Walcott’s most recent collection, White Egrets, here.

Derek Walcott, Selected Poems, Faber & Faber 2007

More of Daljit Nagra

By Rob Packer

Daljit Nagra’s latest poetry collection (I wrote here about his debut, Look We Have Coming to Dover! and read the title poem here) was recently released in paperback and has the—quirky, unwieldy, memorable—title of Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! Yes, dear reader, count how many exclamation marks Nagra has used in the space of two published books. I have a feeling that this unorthodoxy is deliberately to send sensitive punctuators away huffing and puffing, making it both a pretty ballsy move and a mark of confidence (bad content plus conspicuous title would be, after all, embarrassing for all concerned).

The title, which I’ll be calling White-Man-Eating Tiger from now on, comes from a musical automaton now in London’s V&A, which shows a tiger mauling a European soldier and belonged to Tipu Sultan, a late 18th-century king of Mysore, close to today’s Bangalore. The symbolism is obvious, but those adjectives and exclamation marks—as well as the circus-style design on the cover of the hardback—actually make things more ambiguous and made me wonder where the comedy, satire or spleen begin and end.

Tipu’s Tiger
(Source: Wikimedia Commons and Victoria and Albert Museum http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O61949/mechanical-organ-automaton-tippoos-tiger/)

Disquiet in David Harsent’s Night

By Rob Packer

A man roams his house at night, runs down two flights of stairs and, to his surprise third, and is suddenly drinking a margarita in a cellar bar when a stranger turns to him:

‘I never envied another man’s life,’
he says, ‘the way I’ve envied yours, the full and fine
day-after-day of it, a house so full of song, a wife
so sleek and quick to please, your music, your books,
those times in the summerhouse with friends and wine;
or candles shifting the shadows, and soft rain
stippling the darkened window as she turned to you again.

This comes near the start of ‘Elsewhere’, the quest poem that closes David Harsent’s 2011 collection, Night and at first glance, looks the epitome of idyllic bourgeois fantasy. If you re-read it, maybe you’ll catch a twinge of misogyny in the “quick to please” wife, or a hint of menace in the shadows encroaching towards the end of the stanza, or just as likely, you’ll take the idyll at face value. By this stage of the collection, however, you should have learnt that looks can be deceiving and to expect the worst. Throughout, the poet makes the familiar uncanny, gradually and subtly creating its own world of realigned and juxtaposed imagery

In an earlier poem—which clearly resonates here—the narrator waits hidden in a darkened, rainy garden looking in (spying?) on a woman setting the table; in another, he’s “shitfaced” at 3am “lost in your own backyard”. Memorably in ‘Spatchcock’ the boundaries between sex, sunbathing and barbecuing a chicken are gruesomely indistinct. In others, birdsong is redefined as the sound of death and ghosts, or an enclosed garden becomes a trap and the key no more than a talisman:

Here is your key. It was specially cut. If the door
to the garden blows shut as you enter, at least
you’ll have your own key, though the way out is not
really the same.

The effect is cumulative and you learn to arm yourself against the underlying tension and unexpected twists, making it almost unsurprising when the barfly continues, saying:

‘But more than anything, I envy this: the day you woke
to the knowledge that true sacrifice is gain
and junked the lot, setting out at once, a bleak
road ahead of you, the weather closing in, her last
desperate kiss still cooling on your cheek;
and I’m more jealous of that touch than of the least
part of what you’d just flushed down the pan.’

It seems a paradox that the stranger’s deepest jealousy is of a “desperate kiss” with its implications of pain, but it echoes through the rest of the poem, a dark epic through a nocturnal cityscape, where “promises freely offered are better taken by force”. It’s a strange, amorphous place where streets suddenly change, mannequins come to life and the narrator’s guide is a dog that may (or may not) metamorphose into women. It feels like an elaborate metaphor for something, but what? A dream? Depression? Drunkenness? A journey to the underworld, Aeneas-style? The clue for me was in the leitmotif of night and the narrator’s inability to forget, reminding me of Borges’s story, ‘Funes the Memorious’ with its meditation on insomnia.

But ultimately, any “meaning” feels equally indistinct among the tension, uneasiness and sometimes disgust that Harsent creates, based as much—if not more—on what is not said than what is. In a lot of ways, these feelings reminded me a lot of the anonymous warzone of his 2005 collection, Legion, most memorably in the sniper in a bell tower allowing people below to survive by his grace alone (with its echoes of the Yugoslavian wars). Where Night is different, though, is where it puts a similar tension in a far more familiar, domestic setting. In some ways, that is what makes it even more disquieting.

David Harsent, Night, Faber & Faber, 2011

The British Library, Carol Ann Duffy and Pubs

By Rob Packer

A few weeks ago I went to Writing Britain, the British Library’s summer exhibition, which looks at the landscape of the British Isles and its influence on literature. With illuminated manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales and W. B. Yeats, notebooks of Blake and Coleridge, and 150 other bits and pieces of literariness, I found it engrossing. But after a good three hours of geekdom, I started to wonder how much background knowledge you need to appreciate a show like this—probably a common problem of curating books. For example, if Mrs Dalloway or Wuthering Heights immediately evoke Woolf’s London or the Bronte’s Pennines, it’s probably because I’ve read them and know both places. On the other hand, if it’s something I’ve never heard of, much less read (such as Walter Brierley’s 1935 novel, Means Test Man), it tells me about an aesthetic movement and that industrial landscapes encouraged literature, but not a lot else. As a result, the exhibition is only at its best when it reminds and evokes, as well as informs.

An exception is poetry and song, which just work quicker, and there are some great pairings that use different media, like the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’ with videos of 1950’s Liverpool, or recordings of poems from Ted Hughes’ Return to Elmet (1979) reunited with Fay Goodwin’s photos (maybe more on that some other time). My easy favourite was Carol Ann Duffy’s paean-lament for the British pub, ‘John Barleycorn’, which recalls an archetypal Britain, creating more of a personal mind map, than anything cartographical.

Rain by Don Paterson

By Rob Packer

At first glance it seems the perfect opening metaphor: a poem about two trees lashed together, their branches intertwining over time and eventual separation so that:

each strained on its shackled root to face
the other’s empty, intricate embrace.

But Don Paterson’s 2009 collection, Rain (his latest), also begins by prohibiting interpretation and the poem concludes:

They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.

Don Paterson’s Rain

Over-interpretation is something all poetry readers dabble in every now and again—sometimes it really is irresistible—but in an extreme and simple example, I heard Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, say in this podcast that his mother is often interpreted as Palestine: he really is writing about his mother. For good measure, Paterson closes the collection with “and none of this, none of this matters”.

Ultimately this means you can concentrate on Paterson’s fantastic use of language that often rumbles along unobtrusively in subtly rhymed and effortless metre and end up leading you into a trap. Domesticity often hides something dark or unnerving, referenced obliquely and unexplained: a child tied up like some Frankenstein creation or a son’s hand that shakes because “one inch from home, we couldn’t get the air to him”. Paterson’s genius lies in the way he makes the unsaid say more than the said and he does this best in the opening to ‘The Story of the Blue Flower’:

My boy was miles away, yes, I admit it,
but the place was empty, my lines of sight were good
and besides, such things were unknown in this town –

Even without any details, these is a hidden menace below the surface: which “lines of sight”? Maybe he has a gun? And what things are “unknown in this town”? We assume the worst, but still aren’t sure. This menace reminded me of the Spanish theatre genre* of the esperpento, Valle-Inclán’s theatre of the grotesque, where language is colloquial and reality is deformed by the grotesque.

Rain is fascinating for its effortlessness, simplicity and often-grotesque imagery, but also for its varied poetic forms and influences that come from far and wide. There is a sequence of adaptations of poets like Li Po, Antonio Machado or Robert Desnos and a fantastic poetic description of Zurbarán’s masterpiece of dark and shadow, St Francis in Meditation (a personal National Gallery favourite). There is the strangely wonderful ‘Song for Natalia “Tusja” Beridze’, a poem about a musical internet obsession with a Georgian electronic musician, where I just enjoyed finding out just what Paterson is going to use as a rhyme (struggling/Googling, virusy/piracy and maxxing/taxing are particular gems). But some of the most entertaining verse comes in a 35-poem renku sequence**, where some made me laugh out loud and others are simple at first glance but incredibly deep: it’s impossible to choose favourites, but here’s one of the most bizarre ones:

Aha! The zip
for that idiot-suit.
And inside? Zip!

Don Paterson, Rain, Faber & Faber 2009

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* Admittedly not one I know well, though.

** If you think of renku as a sequence of haikus, you get the right kind of idea.

White Egrets by Derek Walcott

By Rob Packer

It doesn’t happen too often that I pull out a book of poetry in Waterloo Station to read a few lines to a friend. She and I were each heading back home from a rather literary lunch; I opened the book (almost) at random and read:

If all these words were different-coloured pebbles,
with little pools that the blue heron might drink from,
a mosaic sheeted and glazed by the vanishing bubbles
of the shallows, and bannered waves marching to the sea’s drum,
if they were more than black marks on white paper,
and sounds that our eyes make upon their meeting,
they would all be yours …

We then had to break off and run for our trains, but these lines remain some of my favourite of White Egrets, the 2010 collection by St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott (1930–). They’re also characteristic of a collection that creates potent image after potent image in the reader’s mind and weaves together motifs that echo, develop and interact through the collection: it feels as much a poetic sequence as a collection.

The “bannered waves” of the sea are a constant presence throughout White Egrets. The sea creates comparisons of “huge trees tossing at the edge of the lawn like a heaving sea without crests” and is described in countless ways, whether “a bosoming wave unbuttons her white bodice” or the reader being invited to:

Watch how spray will burst
like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,
gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at first,
its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall
to the lace-rocked foam.

A white egret (Source: JJ Harrison, Wikimedia Commons)

The sea also recalls the Caribbean’s history: it stretches off to Africa and Europe (Sicily and Andalucía feature particularly strongly). It clearly references the triangular slave trade, which resulted in the syncretic Caribbean culture and I found Walcott’s linking of Syracuse in Sicily with St Lucia fascinating. As well as both being islands, where “the sea was the same except for its history”, they share the same patron saint.

The “blue heron” of the extract I read in Waterloo also makes a visual allusion to the book’s most fluid motif: the white egrets of the title (egrets are a type of heron and look very similar). They are both beauty and terror; they are immortality, death, anonymity, human transience and nature’s permanence; they are rhymed visually with sails, with regrets, with poems, letters, clouds and sea waves breaking.

Every time the white egret reappears, it adds a new and contradictory shade of meaning. Right now, I imagine them as metaphors for the creative process: the muse’s fleeting ideas that arrive—and disappear—without warning. In an hour, I might imagine them as Walcott’s drive “to paint and write well in what could be my last year”. Tomorrow, I may think that they defy interpretation completely. But it’s these connections and contradictions between the book’s imagery and motifs that are really what add so much to its richness and make it such a joy to read and re-read.

Derek Walcott, White Egrets, Faber & Faber 2010