This is a moving and deeply humane book. Different qualities combine to make it a must-have for anyone whose poetic tastes are at all like mine.<\/p>\n
For one thing, there\u2019s Constantine\u2019s mastery of the singing line. In many of these poems, the rhythms, the play of sound and the controlled fluidity of the syntax are intense pleasures in themselves. However, Constantine knows to use such qualities sparingly, keeping us on our toes by disrupting smooth rhythms and syntax with angularity and roughness, throwing grit and dissonance into the music, emphasising the expressiveness of sound rather than its harmony. In short, his purely lyrical gifts get their full force from the way they\u2019re both complemented and thrown into relief by gifts of a different kind. As well as a poet he\u2019s a distinguished novelist and short story writer. A poem called \u201cHouse by the ancient agora\u201d will illustrate how much even brief lyrical poems can be given their shape by what is essentially a narrative arc:<\/p>\n
So you can step down from your garden
\nAnd go under the capacious planes and poplars
\nInto a habitat of terrapins and dragonflies
\nAnd many reminders of streets and occupations.
\nThere for example is a place where the nymphs were worshipped
\nAnd that is a conduit for the mountain\u2019s cold water.
\nI should think there is more of the old town in your cellar.
\nYou are a later deposit
\nStill lying awake and listening to the sea.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Though there\u2019s something magical about the first two lines, it doesn\u2019t derive from anything obvious in the expression, unless it be the mysterious \u201cSo\u201d with its suggestion of different possible narrative contexts. For seven lines, both language and rhythms are pretty flat. What\u2019s gripping is the sense of involvement in a miniature story of discovery that develops through a series of twists to its startling conclusion. When the literal language of these seven lines gives way to the haunting metaphors of the last two, it\u2019s as if the floor had dropped from under us, precipitating us out of our secure footing in time and space, surrounding us with visionary glimpses and expanding perspectives. In the context of the book as a whole, images of rivers and the sea have recurred and accumulated a rich, powerful and diverse suggestiveness. In the local context of this poem, \u201cstill\u201d creates a shimmer of different timescales, the hours of a day, the years of a life, the millennia of archaeology. Now, too, that mastery of rhythm and auditory suggestiveness that I talked about earlier suddenly suffuses the writing: as well as breathing a sense of hushed awe into the last line, Constantine makes us hear the hiss and flow of the sea in the surges of its cadences and in its sibilants and liquid ls.<\/p>\n
Poem after poem gives a similar impression of receiving a revelation. A kiteboarder is suddenly seen as \u201cthe glance and dazzle of an angel\u201d; swallows arrive on an island \u201cLike thoughts from nowhere\u201d, \u201cvoracious, and like the imagination\u2019s \/ Sudden joyous connecting fall to feeding\u201d. As that image suggests, these epiphanies are neither simply given from outside the poet nor spun from his own entrails; they\u2019re perceptions of the world beyond him that are actively pursued by his hungry imagination. Beauty, joy and wonder are what he seeks and repeatedly finds, but to find them he has to fight through a great deal of ugliness and pain \u2013 the ugliness of what people do to each other and the world, the pain that is part of the condition of mortality. From beginning to end, the book is haunted by the knowledge that we must die. Two moving poems, \u201cThe makings of his breathing …\u201d and \u201cFor a while after a death …\u201d are apparently about the death of a close friend. Others depict the tombs, memorials and death-masks of the long dead. There\u2019s nothing depressed or lugubrious about them though. Staring unblinkingly at death, as other poems stare unblinkingly at cruelty and ugliness, they counterpoise it with a sense of the strength of life, of love, joy, wonder and desire.<\/p>\n
One of the things that gives Constantine\u2019s work its peculiar value is the extent to which it\u2019s fed by different European traditions. Among the outstanding achievements of this volume are versions of Ovidian myths. In \u201cErisychthon and his daughter Mestra\u201d (considerably expanded from Ovid), the greedy tyrant Erisychthon offends Demeter by cutting down a sacred oak to build a banqueting hall. She curses him with unappeasable hunger, and after he\u2019s consumed everything edible in his kingdom he\u2019s forced to wander with his daughter Mestra, whom he prostitutes to buy food. The ecological resonances of the tale are obvious but they\u2019re only a small part of its power. In Constantine\u2019s telling, it grips you by its sheer clarity, memorability and force as story. It\u2019s fraught with multiple, ambiguous implications about life in a way only story and drama can be. The poet\u2019s job is to make these implications shine out of the words and strike the imagination of his reader. I hope a short quotation can show how triumphantly Constantine succeeds:<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They began their progress
\nMestra and the king with the cavernous bright eyes
\nWorking the frontier, day after day, from house to house
\nShe continued her education in the school of hunger
\nAnd in every house they left a feeling of infamy
\nAnd longings as keen as the start of a starvation …<\/p>\n
I would like to thank Patricia Oxley for permission to repost this review, which I wrote for Acumen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a moving and deeply humane book. Different qualities combine to make it a must-have for anyone whose poetic tastes are at all like mine. For one thing, there\u2019s Constantine\u2019s mastery of the singing line. In many of these poems, the rhythms, the play of sound and the controlled fluidity of the syntax are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-constantine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533"}],"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=1533"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1542,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533\/revisions\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}