Arc Publications, \u00a39.99 paperback, 154 pp; \u00a3 12.99 hardback 154 pp<\/p>\n
I enjoyed this book immensely.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the work of a highly cultured novelist, poet and literary critic, so not surprisingly there are many poems about writers or about places and people on the international literary circuit, as well as translations or adaptations of pieces by Catullus, Montale and Jaccottet. At the same time, it\u2019s immensely grounded.<\/p>\n
A fundamental motive of Stead\u2019s writing appears in the title of \u201cStay Alert\u201d. In this, the poet\u2019s companion is startled by an unexpected intensity of blue striking her peripheral vision, asks what it is, then laughs, realising it\u2019s just the sky seen through leaves after rain. Stead remarks, \u201cThere it goes, \/ the poetic moment \/ so easily missed, \/ so quickly lost.\u201d Similarly, \u201cWhy Poetry?\u201d suggests that the point of poetry is to express, see, feel and become different beauties, powers, and lives outside yourself, those of a cat, a heron, Hamlet, or fish in a stream seen long ago. This is writing that makes you more alive to the world, and one of the main ways it does so is through a brilliant use of imagist techniques to capture transient perceptions, whether by creating an impression of the moment in which something strikes the consciousness, or to evoke creatures in movement. There\u2019s none of the dogmatic narrowness of classical Imagism though. Stead isn\u2019t afraid to interweave description with comment, or even to use the pathetic fallacy. He does so in \u201cWhen I Touched Your Wrist\u201d, describing how a tender memory came back to him<\/p>\n
as the solution to a puzzle
\ncomes
\nto one who has slept
\nor as the sun comes<\/p>\n
to the sea at Zadar
\ntaking it by surprise.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Because his style is so bare and clear in other ways, the device comes across here as a freshly minted, living metaphor. He uses it to more complicated effect in this section of a witty and enchanting little poem about trying to pronounce the Italian words for pork and honey:<\/p>\n
\u2018Maiale<\/i>\u2019, I say
\nand then \u2018miele<\/i>\u2019,
\nspeaking with care
\nwhile the sun writes on the sea
\na script of its own devising
\nand among the rocks
\nthe sea
\nmakes light of it.<\/p>\n
This tiny moment resonates with a sense of man\u2019s cosmic insignificance, and at the same time sparkles with delight in the play of mind.\u00a0 Linguistic transparency gives clarity and force to the punning of \u201cmakes light of it\u201d, but the force is delicately applied, the resonances are subtle, and Stead leaves it open to us to read the poem as we will. I find humorous self-deprecation in the contrast between the tiny labour of the poet and the vast effortless spontaneity of nature, a hint of wryness at the sense that all our efforts will ultimately come to nothing, but above all a joy in the moment made radiant by the last line.<\/p>\n
My settling on this poem is arbitrary in a sense. Many others would equally well have illustrated how Stead makes small occasions shimmer with wider suggestiveness.<\/p>\n
Pieces about writers, including the long-dead Catullus and Wordsworth, are completely grounded in this immediate sense of what it is to be alive in the world. \u201cIschaemia\u201d, which imagines Catullus as suffering from a form of dyslexia as a result of a constriction in blood supply to the brain, has him describing how he\u2019s forced to relearn how to read the world spatially. He seems to share the aesthetic I tried to describe above, and the evidence of his success in seeing the world again is a stanza of razor-sharp animal descriptions. Even more impressive is \u201cThe Prelude\u201d. It begins with Dorothy Wordsworth\u2019s anguish at William\u2019s marriage; it goes on to show William hearing \u201ca force\u201d rush by and being reminded by it of \u201cwhat he felt so deeply \/ so long ago\u201d; it describes his labour on The Prelude<\/i>; it places \u201cus\u201d in the poet\u2019s house and garden, looking at his things, thinking about him and Dorothy, and it ends<\/p>\n
The sparrows don\u2019t know
\nthey\u2019re living in
\na poet\u2019s garden,<\/p>\n
that the flowers were planted
\nby the poet\u2019s
\nunhappy sister,<\/p>\n
that his life was the poem
\nand had to remain unfinished
\nuntil the last moment.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Language couldn\u2019t be plainer, but the whole is enormously resonant. The rapid shifts of perspective set complicated feelings and wide ripples of suggestion in motion. Stead creates impressions of the poet and his sister with the sparest imaginable strokes, yet so vividly that Dorothy\u2019s argument with herself seems to start into life in her own words in line 8 (not quoted). Both poet and sister are touched with humour, even satire. At the same time, Stead makes you feel there\u2019s a kind of moral grandeur in the way they persisted in creating their different forms of beauty and left their differently enduring marks on earth. The whole poem is suffused with compassionate understanding, with a sense of the vanity and at the same time the immense worth of human endeavour, and it echoes with what Wordsworth himself called \u201cthe still, sad music of humanity\u201d.<\/p>\n
All this has got rather heavy. As you read them, the poems are lightness itself, and the ideas they set in motion move into the mind easily and spontaneously. I\u2019d like to finish by saying that this is a very peopled<\/i> volume. Stead isn\u2019t a novelist for nothing. Major writers like Katherine Mansfield, Alan Curnow and Eugenio Montale come alive in its pages, but so do a crowd of little known or even anonymous characters, often in brief but memorable glimpses or in what they say. There\u2019s a constant stream of wit, sometimes dry, even astringent, sometimes as buoyant and joyous as the rude pun on a \u201cpurple passage\u201d in \u201cEnd of Story\u201d. Complementing the wit and leavened by it there\u2019s a pervasive sense of time and mortality. Admittedly there are light-weight pieces, squibs that exhaust themselves in a single enjoyable flash, occasional poems that don\u2019t move much beyond their occasions, but I wouldn\u2019t wish them away either; they add to the sense of the poet\u2019s constant engagement with life as it presents itself from day to day. Altogether, this is a book to read and reread for sheer entertainment blended with deep wisdom, humanity and poetic skill.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arc Publications, \u00a39.99 paperback, 154 pp; \u00a3 12.99 hardback 154 pp I enjoyed this book immensely. It\u2019s the work of a highly cultured novelist, poet and literary critic, so not surprisingly there are many poems about writers or about places and people on the international literary circuit, as well as translations or adaptations of pieces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c-k-stead","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1351,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}