Review of Dante’s Inferno tr. Philip Terry

Dante’s Inferno by Philip Terry, pub. Oystercatcher Press. £4.50

This short pamphlet contains selected cantos from The Inferno, rendered into contemporary English, and transposed to the present-day. It is, presumably, extracted from a translation of the whole work. Here are the famous, and portentous opening lines of Dante’s poem.

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura…

(“Halfway along the path of life
I found myself in a dark wood…”)

And here's Terry:

Halfway through a bad trip
I found myself in this stinking car park,
Underground, miles from Amirillo.

Instead of Virgil as guide to the underworld, we have Ted Berrigan, and instead of a leopard barring the poet's way, we have "a hairy she-rat/that stalks me like a pimp". In the passage in Canto VII where the narrator's way forward is prevented by the damned, and he faces returning without his guide, he says:

Gentle reader, imagine how I shat myself
When those words reached my ears!

This version is funny – something not often associated with Dante translations (or with Dante himself)  – and as racy as the original. As you’ll have gathered, it’s very much in the contemporary vernacular; which seems appropriate, given that Dante himself used the Tuscan dialect instead of Latin, the poetic language of the day. Here's the opening of Canto XXVIII:

Who could, even in the goriest movie

Tell the tale of blood and guts [I saw]...

... I guarantee you every effect would fail

That last-quoted line is perfect - almost banal in its everyday realism (it's straight from contemporary spoken idiom), yet expertly judged;  musical with its repeated 'f' and 'v' sounds and its long consonants, and sounding just the right emphatic note. Like the original, this version reflects back to us the world of current affairs, and passes judgement in the best polemical style. Irish history looms large (Terry was born in Belfast), and we have Ian Paisley in Hell with Seamus Twomey ("who planted the car bomb in Donegal Street") alongside Oliver Cromwell, Ian Trimble, Bernadette Devlin and others.

Dante’s poem has had a mixed reception among British poets, being for a long time regarded as a grotesque oddity, and avoided as a catholic text. After Chaucer’s death, no part of the Inferno was translated into English until Jonathan Richardson’s version of the Ugolino episode in 1719; a gap of three hundred years. The tide turned during the eighteenth century, with its notion of ‘the sublime’, and Dante was subsequently revered by the Romantics and admired during the nineteenth century. But it was the modernists, and particularly T.S. Eliot, who presented The Inferno in the way that it’s still, to some extent, regarded today; as a kind of sacred text, and, of course, as it was usually quoted in the original, as a bar to the uneducated. Today, any poet wishing to enter The Canon feels obliged to give us a rendering of at least part of The Inferno – Heaney, O’Brien, Kinsella and numerous others have had a go; in a sense, it’s still being used as a shibboleth. For me, it’s good to see Terry’s irreverence and comedy dispense with that notion.

But there’s no doubt that Terry clearly knows the original well, and expects his readers to know it too. It’s not possible to fully appreciate this version – including the humour of it – without at least a passing knowledge of the original or an alternative translation; if you know which medieval figures have been replaced by Ian Paisley or Mervyn King, then it certainly adds to ones’ appreciation. Helen Vendler has claimed that ‘updating Dante’s circumstances… becomes parodic’; this may be true, and certainly, at one level, Terry’s version is a parody. But it’s also – like all translations – a new poem based on the original, and that new poem is much more than just a parody. Dante had tremendous audacity in condemning, as he saw fit, many of his contemporaries to Hell, including some who were not yet dead. In Terry's version, we have Bank of England governor Mervyn King ("man's arch enemy") alongside a bunch of people doing the conga for all eternity, some crying "What's the point of saving?" others "Take out an ISA!" - all of which leads to an impassioned tirade:

'This Capital you speak of,
what is it,
that has the world so in its clutches?'

And he replied: 'People are mugs,
things of real value,
friendship, love,

Poetry, health,
they ride over roughshod
for a slice of Capital's cake.

Commodity fetishism rules the day
drowning us in a sea of white goods
and smart gadgets.

This little pamphlet is a hugely entertaining read, and it gives the reader a good idea of what it must have been like to read Dante when he was contemporary – of the sheer shock value of some of his judgements, and of narrative thrust of the poem.  The extracts appear to be part of a full-length translation, the publication of which is something we can all look forward to.

References:

1. English Translations of Dante in the Eighteenth Century, Paget Toynbee. The Modern Language Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Oct., 1905), pub. Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association

1.  “Can we conceive of Beatrice ‘snapping’ like a shrew?” Helen Vendler, review of “Dante in English” edited by Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds. London Review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 17 · 1 September 2005

Copyright © Alan Baker, 2012

"Wildlife" by Rupert Loydell

Wildlife by Rupert Loydell (Shearsman, 2011).

Review by Daniel O'Donnell-Smith

This latest poetry collection from the prolific Rupert Loydell, is a study of otherness; one man in contrast with everything. Covering a range of subjects from parental loss to leaving one’s shoes behind in a foreign country so that they may enjoy an unending holiday, Loydell’s work presents as a series of micro-essays, a kind of Philosophy-of-Everything, underpinned by bathetic humour and the notion that death, as an absurd adversary to the natural world, is always in view: ‘I am happiest hiding behind curtains or drapes, think I am ready to dig my own grave’.

The work is one of self-reflection and (non-mawkish) nostalgia or, more accurately, the sense of history one feels when one encounters a place. Running throughout the entire book is a sequence of poems entitled Animals Are Not Your Friends – a collection of curios, existential musings and lurking creatures; egrets and spiders hiding in the crease of the page, looking on (just out of sight but ever-present). Loydell constructs a poetics of organisms and organics. ‘Nests’ of letters actively arrange themselves to become the work; a hive mind of poetic thought housing ‘germs of ideas’ that self-organise into a repeating and self-replicating pattern. Each variation of Animals Are Not Your Friends is arranged into sets of four neat, centred stanzas ending with a disembodied quotation. This structure is safe, a rigid form to protect against the ‘dark and wilful energy’ of creatures that bite, howl, kill and are generally naughty (knocking over bins etc.).

I am thinking about what you have made,
those drawings with water, circles of stone,
marks left on the hills or the beach;
about how you then let time and weather
blow them away into memory’s book.

Animals are not your friends. They plunder
for their nest and forage for their food,
they run away and don’t return, fight
other cats at night. It’s no use limping home
to me, you’ll get no sympathy.

I am thinking that it doesn’t really matter
if you made those marks or took these walks,
or if you’re who I think you are. There is
still mud on the wall and your photographs
where text and landscape blur.

Animals are not your friends and art critics
are all snakes. What do they know about life
or being alone for a week? A stone is a stone
is a stone is a stone. Look at where the path
might go, at patterns in the sand.

“I prefer to leave things unsaid.”

At the beginning of Wildlife there is a quote from Anne Michaels’ What the Light Teaches – ‘When there are no places left for us, we’ll still talk in order to make things true’. Snatches of conversation are threaded throughout the book; a collage of vivid thoughts and recollections creating a confessional of sorts though one that is purposefully unreliable. Loydell never fully lets on whether or not he believes in the statements he makes: ‘…this poem is not concerned with truth or experience or even being honest’ (a line which in itself may not be true, taken from Line by Line). Not that one feels emotionally short-changed or intellectually hoodwinked - the victim of some philosophical flim-flam - rather, this approach seems to mimic the untrustworthiness of the natural world and the slippery glissage of thought and observation serves to amuse as a subversive pastiche on the uncertainty of it all.

Sometimes Loydell takes the form of a kindly pater familias, leaning in to impart advice and gently inform on the world, at other times he’s on a step-ladder in Hyde Park berating foxes and geese. Nature, lacking in tenderness, refuses to be tamed as families change; losing and gaining members with each progression: shoes are left on holiday, dead fish stink out their museum and words, not being ‘made to last’, face an uncertain future in what is a careful, humourous, and affecting discourse on the ephemeral nature of life, art and writing.

Daniel O’Donnell-Smith, 2012.

PR Reviews Monk

"Polaroidy: The Revels Of Geraldine Monk" by Adam Piette

Poetry Reading in Leicester

What a line up!

Carrie Etter at the Flying Goose

I published Carrie Etter's pamphlet 'Yet' five years ago, but last night at the Flying Goose was the first time we'd met, and I can say it was a great pleasure. Carrie's reading was revelatory, and, for me, it added an extra dimension to the poetry. The work in her Shearsman collection 'Divining for Starters' has elements of abstraction, and the title sequence, which investigates our cultural predilection for defining new beginnings, is full of false starts and broken sentences, and of snatches of language left unfinished. But there's also a strong sensual element to Etter's poetry, most evident in the remarkable 'Erotics' section. What last night's reading did for me, was to add a sense of place and a sense of the personal to these elements, and to foreground the musicality of the words (yes, I do believe poetry has a musical element, and that the sound of the words is very much part of its effect). Carrie has a  strong mid-western accent, and we had a conversation afterwards about how, because I had an English 'internal reader', hearing the words in her own accent subtly changed my reception of them. This, added to her brief introductions, placing the poems in a context of growing up in Illinois, and of her relationship with her late father, grounded the work in a way that silent reading couldn't completely do. The reading ended with a number of poems from her pamphlet, 'The Son', about her experience of giving up a son for adoption; I've reviewed this powerful sequence on Litterbug, so I won't add more, except to say that several audience members, including myself, found the reading a moving experience.

John James's new pamphlet

John James: Cloud Breaking Sun. Oystercatcher Press,
£5.00 A5 32pp. ISBN: 978-1-905885-51-0


The great thing about pamphlets is that you can roll them up and shove them in your back pocket and read them while eating your sandwich at lunch time or waiting in the rain for your train to work. Another great thing is that you can get a buzz from the contrast between the fragile and ephemeral nature of the stapled pamphlet and the sometimes astonishing beauty of the contents, as I did with my two latest Oystercatchers, one containing the luminous, spare wordcraft of Carol Watts, and the other new work by the great John James.


The poems by James are in his trademark laconic style, in plain language, set in France and Bristol, and containing a number of tributes to other poets - Barry MacSweeney, Apollinaire, John Temple and others. But the tone is a long way from the patrician "hail fellow, well met"; instead, it's cool and ironic, full of lyricism and beauty. The opening poem is a tribute to the late Andrew Crozier (topical, given the new 'Crozier Reader' from Carcanet):


...at the kitchen table I put a hand to my breast in sorrow
then reach for the wine still singing
& your book resonant of a life
neither following nor in pursuit
at the end of a line let me read it again...


The poems are full of named people ('I reach toward the poetry of kindred') - family, friends and fellow poets - and are distinctly elegiac in tone. The language is plain, the speech direct. Reading this pamphlet got me wondering about the difference between these poems and the typical first-person-anecdote poem that I find so dull. One difference is that these poems look outward - to the persons addressed and to the world of affairs and politics (though they're not overtly political). The poems feel open; they don't tell us how to respond; they don't sum things up neatly; the persona in them is vague and unemphatic, subordinated to the external world and to the other characters that appear in the poems. But in the end, these things matter less than the fact that the poetry is supremely well-written, the result of lifetime's attention to the art of language; they have that undefinable quality which tells us we're in the presence of the real thing:


BREAKFAST AT RED LODGE


Stop on the turnpike in the month of May
& after breakfast head up country. From here on, says J,
grinning over a serious forkful of Red Lodge Special,
we're in the Texas of East Anglia.
Is that so, says, J, with mock sobriety.


The counter of the cafe painted cheerful red, the tea is hot & brown
& the heads of passing saints smile down
from the wall on these two pilgrims
laughing madly in the Hopper window
where space opens up into the blue beyond the red & white stripe canopy.


Years later swirls of sandy dust blow low across the truck park over the street.
At the next table Asterix the Gaul steadies himself above a dish of red meat.
HGV men return their empty plates and are gone.
It's a sunny afternoon. Drive on, they say, drive on.

AT THE OBLIVION TEA ROOMS by C.J. Allen

AT THE OBLIVION TEA ROOMS by C.J. Allen
Price: £8.99 ISBN: 978-0-9570984-3-5. pub. Nine Arches.


This is the first full-length collection that C.J. Allen has published since his 'New and Selected' from Leafe Press. Full of vintage Allen work, it comes highly recommended:


The Memory of Rain


The memory of rain on public parks
and tennis courts. The acres of regrets.
Sunset on the disused printing works,
as good as gold, as good as sunset gets.
The railings with their eczema of rust
you stood in front of once when you were nine
and watched the sky turn colourless and vast.
Dust like old grey blankets. Then more rain.


And love was once the very latest craze,
like alchohol, or sex, or Benzedrine,
and kicked in like all three. On quiet days
you'd watch the old men on the bowling green
and listen to their antiquated banter,
and go for walks, and feel a bit nonplussed,
and head for home and think about the winter
in rooms filled up with sunlight and with dust.

Roy Marshall, Laressa Dickey, Amy De'Ath

Roy Marshall, 'Gopagilla' (Crystal Clear Creators)

Laressa Dickey, 'Companions, Corps of Discovery' (Miel Books)

Amy De'ath, 'Erec and Enide' (Salt Publishing)

I have a (as yet untested) notion that the quality of most published poetry is higher than it was back in the days when output was controlled by a few London publishing houses, and most published poets were educated at Oxford. My contention is supported by three pamphlets I picked up at the Leicester book fair back in March. All three poets are at the beginning of their careers, or at least of their careers as published poets, although I believe that Roy Marshall, the oldest of the three, has been writing poetry for some time, and has recently returned after a long lay-off (usually a good sign).

Of these three, Roy Marshall's poetry is the most conventional; his writing contains emotional responses to observed events, subjective commentary on the external world and employs pathos in description of such things as family bonds and the passage of time, all of which is executed with enviable skill. What marks this poet out from many writing in a similar vein is the knack for highlighting the particulars that capture an emotion or encapsulate a story:

The circuitry of crickets on the air,

his red wine and cigarette breath,

a sickle and scythe laid aside,

and rosemary scent, rising.

The valley draped in wood-smoke webs,

my hair ruffled by his hardened hand...

Close observation, combined with beautifully-judged phrasing. Wayne Burrows, in his foreword, talks of Marshall's '...compression and unforced lyricism..' which is about right, but such attributes don't come without hard work and a long poetic apprenticeship; both of which Marshall evidently put in before bringing out this first slim collection. This pamphlet comes from the excellent series of first collections by Leicester-based Crystal Clear Creators.

Marshall's poems have a theme of family history and reconciliation running through them. I quote the following poem in full to show the skill and economy at work here:

National Service

Smaller wars can be fogotten between wars;

afterwards wars, the months and years of enforced peace.

A man of my Dad's generation told me how

you could go from Nissan hut and blancoed coal

to Korea, in a week, how a lad might replace a sentry

who'd been shot that evening;

how, at nineteen, you might catch shrapnel

in your spine and wheel-chair bound

get home to find your teens at an end

and the swinging sixties just beginning.

Laressa Dickey is American, and writes a poetry which is in a recognizably American style; spare and laconic, with its cadences rooted in everyday speech, not dissimilar to the poetry of Shannon Tharp, whom I recently reviewed. Compared to Marshall, Dickey's verse is more abstract, and its effects are reinforced by its spacing on the page. Phrases are lifted from their surrounding language to float as self-contained linguistic units.

You can go where you are not wanted

think those places slowly

without actually breaking skin

The impression I got from this poetry was rootlessness and distance; something reflecting perhaps the vast physical dimensions of the USA. I was confirmed in this feeling by reading the afterword, in which Dickey says:

'In my imagination, since I was a young girl, Amelia Earhart has been crossing the ocean and roaming the skies continuously. The memory of flight, the memory of roaming'.

The poems also touch on the domestic lives of women. Dickey asks 'what is it to be a women living - with what am I to concern myself.'  The poems address this question in snatches of words, like entries in a notebook:

Pretend love is a rocket, small salad greens

I note the seasons

I want to be a beautiful

answerphone

impromptu meetings on limestone hills

When reading these poems I found myself, rather than reading serially, instead scanning the page, and flicking back and forwards in the book, which seems to be a way to let these pieces of language work their meditative effects:

go farther down to board

That evening I was quiet

I believed a song was boarding

The most linguistically innovative poet of these three is Amy De'Ath. The medieval story of Eric and Enide provides a loose framework around which youthful poems of love and desire are constructed, alongside more literary and intertextual poems. The poetry is clearly influenced by Language poetry, and the notes at the back reference Chretien de Troyes, Emily Dickinson, Virgil and John Clare. The language is woven from statements and phrases which at times appear to make sense, and to relate to the adjacent phrases, but most often veer in unexpected and disorienting directions.In this, De'Ath reminds me of the British poets of the 1940s who are being recovered and used as models by many left-field contemporary poets. Here's a poet writing in 1942:

Should I be here in this rare scaffolding

Clutching the promise of primrose?

You with a yokel handful of blight

Pitching your jacket on gowan,

Conceal the hollow in the core of love

For fear will fast after it move.

and here's De'Ath.

How to glide on promise

hunted hunted honed the sky

alone lacking ground a sky

alone on the border of a shadow

of a cloud betrothed and hunted

down.

What's common here is both the lyric impulse, and the denial of a foothold for the reader, thus keeping the attention at surface level, at the level of the language itself. This produces some beautiful effects, and provides an invigorating read; although it's hard on the reader, in comparison with the direct statement and connection with the external world provided by a poet like Roy Marshall.

It should go without saying that I'd recommend anyone to buy and read these three poets.

Anyone recognize the 1940s poet?

Welch on Lowenstein

Review: 'Ancestors and Species: New and Selected Ethnographic Poetry' by Tom Lowenstein. (Shearsman Books, £9.95)

"The poems in this volume", writes Tom Lowenstein in his introduction, "have all emerged from ethnographic work in Northwest Alaska and come from three separate periods of writing spread over thirty years". In 1993 Bloomsbury published Lowenstein's "Ancient Land: Sacred Whale". Subtitled "The Inuit Hunt and Its Rituals" this account of Eskimo life on the Peninsula of Tikiraq in Alaska focussing on the traditional whale hunt was narrated largely in verse, interspersed with prose sections giving background material. At the time, it attracted some very favourable reviews, in the London Review of Books and elsewhere. But one is struck by the fact that it was reviewed by critics who by and large, did not otherwise write about poetry, and in the poetry magazines the book went largely unacknowledged. It is not as if Lowenstein didn't have a track record. His first book publication had been a collection of translations of Eskimo poetry, made from the versions of the Danish originally collected by Rassmussen; this appeared from Allison and Busby in 1973 at about the same time as his fieldwork in Alaska was getting under way. The first collection of his own poetry to appear, "The Death of Mrs Owl", came out from Anvil in 1977, and in 1978 The Many Press (and here, as the press's founder perhaps I should declare an interest) brought out "Filibustering in Samsara". It is as if, when the Bloomsbury book appeared, people where not quite sure where to place these texts.

To read the full review, click here.

A Servant of the Royal Household

As I've been reminded by James Shapiro's excellent BBC4 documentary, Britain's most influential writer, national artistic icon and cultural export - not to mention literary Olympian - was effectively a servant of the Royal household, paid to entertain, not to say flatter, the King, which he did very effectively. I wonder how much this has influenced British history and helped keep the monarchy in place. I know the plays are ambiguous, ambivalent, questioning and quite clearly transcend their author's role as Royal lackey. But its still easy to construct a composite 'Shakespearean' view that works to support the British monarchy. Indeed, some of the speeches of the history plays are an accepted part of the royalist narrative. Had our foremost poet / dramatist been from the nineteenth century (being a post-revolutionary, more egalitarian era), as were Hugo or Baudelaire in France, or had he been an outsider in the way that, arguably, Dante was in Italy, or, say, Whitman and Dickinson were in the USA, how differently would British history have turned out? I'm not suggesting the the plays' investigations of power and politics are limited, or that, transferred to other cultures, they can't act as powerful challenges to authority; I'm just musing on their influence on Britain and its monarchy; could they be partly responsible for the fact the we're subjects, not citizens, and that our government and top layers of society are - even in the 21st century - stuffed with Lords, Ladies, Dames, Knights, Dukes and Princes?

The Duchess of Malfi, Old Vic, London

Not only did I get to see this superb production the other, but I was lucky enough to go on a night when the main cast members came on stage at the end to conduct a question-and-answer session with the audience. Only a handful of people stayed, so it was quite casual and intimate; quite a privilege. Eve Best (who was wonderful in the title role) said that that she found it harder to learn lines of this play than any other play she'd acted in. The other cast members concurred, suggesting that it was the irregularity of the verse, and its regular lapses into prose that made it difficult. Everyone agreed however, that 'The Duchess of Malfi' contains wonderful poetry. The irregularity of the verse may be because its a relatively late Jacobean work, written in the year of Shakespeare's death.

Scott Thurston on Robert Sheppard's 'The Lores'

Indoor utopia welfare pastoral


The Lores: Robert Sheppard  Reality Street Editions £7.50 ISBN 1-874400-23-7


The Lores, like Empty Diaries, constitutes a major section of Sheppard’s remarkable Twentieth Century Blues project. Like Empty Diaries, it is partly based on mathematical modes of construction, in this case, as Sheppard explains, the number of words in the book – 5040 – derives from Plato’s ideal number of citizens for his second Republic. As Sheppard explains, the fact that this number is divisible by most numbers makes it useful for ‘raising the taxes and militia, and – doubtless – for surveillance’. The tension between Plato’s laws and Sheppard’s lores, suggests the argument underlying the text – that absolute models of power must be resisted and replaced by plurality, even locality in the form of ‘bye-lores’. The poetics of this plurality are documented in Sheppard’s text ‘Linking the Unlinkable’, collected in his Far Language (Stride, 1999). A response to the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard in ‘Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz”’ and Jacques Derrida’s reply to this lecture, Sheppard sketches a poetics of the ‘creative linkage’ of phrases (as opposed to the ‘authority of the sentence’), as a model of ethical writing which argues with Adorno’s notion that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. As Derrida writes: ‘If there is somewhere a One must it must link up with a one must make links with Auschwitz’. Creative linkage is a means by which disparate materials may be yoked together in a politicised poetical discourse. This is not the same as juxtaposition – the links must appear both more and less disruptive, so that they persuade by their connection.


To read the full review, click here:

"The Given" by Robert Sheppard

“The Given” by Robert Sheppard (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 40pp, ISBN: 978-1-907812-07-1 £5.00)

I recently reviewed the "Smartarse" anthology from Knives Forks and Spoons, which I thought was an example of what a good anthology should do, and one of my favourite current pamphlets is this one, "The Given" by Robert Sheppard. Like most KS&F productions, this pamphlet has a workmanlike feel to it, which seems appropriate for the contents, as we get the feeling that Sheppard has moulded his raw materials - the linguistic productions of his earlier life - into a rough-and-ready artefact. The work consists of four prose pieces, totalling forty pages. Section III ends with the following:

"Adrian Clark chalks on the board: 'MATERIALS (the given) + PROCEDURE ="

So 'the given' are the words, the blocks of language taken from old journals and notebooks. The procedure is summarised on the back cover by Scott Thurston:

"Part I attends to what writing has remembered that the writer has not ('I don't remember when I started writing poetry'); part II turns diary entries into questions ('How can he argue that feeling is structural?'); part III revisits the new sentences of Sheppard's 1985 'Letter from Blackstock Road' to process material from that period, whilst part IV alphabetises journal material written only in May, reprising Sheppard's Mayday texts and 'Report on Seaport' in his 'Twentieth Century Blues'".

To read the full review, click here.

“The Cost of Walking” by Shannon Tharp

“The Cost of Walking” by Shannon Tharp (Skysill Press, 80pp, £8.95 / $15.00. ISBN: 978-1-907489-06-8)

When I received this book, the latest from Skysill Press, I opened it at random and saw this:

POEM

Graphic
as a flower
blooms
a split lark's
minor
stream.

To present a six-line poem in which four of the lines consist of a single word is a brave move; there's nowhere to hide, so the words have to be right. In this case, 'graphic' is a striking adjective for 'flower', and even more so for the song of a bird. The word 'blooms' being a verb, serves to push the poem forward and 'split' is again, a striking word, applied to both the lark - where it suggests pain or parting, or some less definable rift - and to the stream of its song; which is 'minor' as in musical key, but with suggestions of smallness or insignificance. The title, 'Poem', suggests to the reader that this may be a poem about a poem, a piece of language, an object, which, in WS Graham's phrase, is "an addition to the world". This adds an extra dimension to the piece, where the word 'graphic' for example, implies a whole poetic ethos (which is distinctly American), from imagism onwards, and where the word 'minor', alluding to music, has a different sense when applied to poetry.

To read the full review on Litter, click here.

On Saturday I met with Clive Allen and Adrian Buckner in a cafe on the campus of Nottingham University. The meeting was one of our regular ones at which we bring a poem of our own to discuss and critique, and also, one by another poet. My poem by the 'other poet' was Shakespeare's poem beginning "Let the bird of loudest lay...". The poem in question, usually titled (though not by the author) "The Phoenix and the Turtle", has been one that I've re-read often in recent weeks and which I've been somewhat haunted by. You can read the poem here.

Part of the appeal of this poem is that it's enigmatic and unclear - one reads it as through a glass darkly. Compared to the other poems of WS, it has an unmodern quality: the session of birds and the allegorical figures hark back to Chaucer and the medieval period. But apart from its distance in time, the poem treats its subject matter obliquely, and has a number of puzzling lines. Much ink has been spilt over the possibility that it has coded Catholic sympathies, and there's a convincing theory that the two eponymous birds represent Roger and Anne Line, a married couple, Roman Catholics, who were separated when Roger was exiled for his beliefs, then died abroad. Anne was arrested for harbouring catholic priests and was hanged at Tyburn in 1601, the same year this poem was published. There are remarkable correspondences between this story and the poem; for example, the Lines were known to have taken a vow of celibacy within their marriage, and were childless; in the poem there's the puzzling lines:

Leaving no posterity:--
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.

as well as this:

Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen;

"Distance and no space" is Euclid's definition of a line, something WS would have been aware of from his schoolbook geometry. Despite these correspondences, the evidence is not conclusive, and there are other theories, none of which are ever likely to be finally confirmed. While hauntingly beautiful, the poem remains elusive; were there contemporaries - a select few perhaps - to whom its coded messages were clear? Or are there no coded messages, but a deliberately elusive poem by a supremely skilled writer? Further, how many of us twenty-first century readers can enter the mind of renaissance England to read the poem as contemporaries would have read it? Have the intervening periods - The Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, the age of science and technology - changed us so much that what we read now is analogous to a translation? I'm reminded, in all this, of a short piece of writing by by Jorge Luis Borges: "The Parable of Cervantes and The Quijote". The parable talks about how the opposition in Cervantes' novel was between "the unreal world of the books of chivalry and the ordinary, everyday world of sixteenth century Spain". The parable continues:

"They did not suspect that the years would smooth away that discord, they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto.

For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well."

"..for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. It goes lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull. You can hear that voice in a letter written by the 16th‑century poet Thomas Wyatt to his son: "No doubt in any thing you do, if you ask yourself or examine the thing for yourself afore you do it, you shall find, if it be evil, a repining against it. My son, for our Lord's love, keep well that repining …"

Alice Oswald, on why she withdrew from the TS Eliot Prize.

To read the full article, click here