{"id":1888,"date":"2017-09-11T08:40:31","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T08:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1888"},"modified":"2017-09-11T08:40:31","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T08:40:31","slug":"review-james-sheards-the-abandoned-settlements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1888","title":{"rendered":"Review – James Sheard’s The Abandoned Settlements"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Sheard, The Abandoned Settlements<\/em>, 64 pp, \u00a39.99, Jonathan Cape<\/p>\n

Sheard\u2019s intense lyrical subjectivity contrasts with both Longley<\/a> and Clifton. Most of the poems in The Abandoned Settlements<\/em> involve the ending of a relationship. Many are haunted by other losses, personal or cultural. In some the break-up of the relationship is central; in others, like the fine title poem, there\u2019s a wider focus and a looser weave of analogies between different scenes of physical dereliction and different places where lost love is remembered. This is one of many poems that display Sheard\u2019s gifts in the orchestration of sound and rhythm, his skill in creating pictures drenched in unstated feeling and his ability to bring abstract ideas and images together in a kind of fluid interaction:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like that. It\u2019s like the sands where once you might have watched
\na lover coming wet and lovely towards you \u2013 undisturbed now
\nand colonised by the shyest of creatures.<\/p>\n

Such lines are vividly cinematic, though they also express a state of mind in a way only words can. Many of these poems do suggest cinema at its most sophisticated, not only in their visual clarity and precision and the expressive way they use visual detail but also in what you might call the smoothness of their tracking, which is something we feel not only in the movement through visual space but also in the way a single imaginative arc carries us through from the visual to the conceptual.\u00a0 In \u201cPlumb-Line\u201d, for example, one sentence tracks from close-up (\u201cThe time will come \/ when fingers moving \/ restless on a table-top \/ will touch a thread\u201d) to a longer shot (\u201cand find its loop \/ and drop a plumb-line\u201d) to end in a purely conceptual metaphor (\u201cclean down through me\u201d).<\/p>\n

Every poem in this book gave me real, often keen sensuous pleasure. Pretty well every poem fused that pleasure with more complicated, elusive but haunting emotional experiences of loss and displacement and the continuing power of love. We see this fusion in the penultimate poem, \u201cLate\u201d. The speaker says he brought someone \u201chere in late summer\u201d:<\/p>\n

to watch you walk up through the blown grasses
\nand their feathery tops moving gently around you.
\nYou came to me, slowly, down the long shade<\/p>\n

of the laburnum arch …<\/p>\n

The physical details are hallucinatorily clear and they\u2019re shone through by larger meanings in a completely unforced way, the suggestions shimmering directly into the imagination without any effort of intellectual decoding. It\u2019s one of many moments of remarkable delicacy and imaginative force. And yet on a more profound level nothing is solid, everything swims in an indeterminate space between possibility and actuality because of the way in which in the poem as a whole different times and grammatical moods dissolve into each other. This, I think, is what is truly remarkable about Sheard\u2019s achievement; not the sensuous imagery in and for itself, impressive though that is, but the precision with which he uses it to evoke states of feeling that are as powerful as they are shifting and difficult to define.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to post this review, which appeared in The North 58.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Sheard, The Abandoned Settlements, 64 pp, \u00a39.99, Jonathan Cape Sheard\u2019s intense lyrical subjectivity contrasts with both Longley and Clifton. Most of the poems in The Abandoned Settlements involve the ending of a relationship. Many are haunted by other losses, personal or cultural. In some the break-up of the relationship is central; in others, like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-james-sheard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888"}],"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=1888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1890,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions\/1890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}