{"id":2540,"date":"2021-12-20T14:38:57","date_gmt":"2021-12-20T14:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2540"},"modified":"2021-12-20T14:38:57","modified_gmt":"2021-12-20T14:38:57","slug":"dom-bury-rite-of-passage-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2540","title":{"rendered":"Dom Bury, Rite of Passage – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dom Bury\u2019s Rite of Passage<\/em> is an intense, visionary work, suffused by images of apocalypse. It presents the environmental crisis as not merely stupidly self-destructive but sinful, a perverse violation of the sacredness of earth.<\/p>\n

The book is structured around the Roman Catholic mass for the dead and the burial rite that follows it. It\u2019s divided into four sections, \u2018Kyrie\u2019, \u2018Dies Irae\u2019, \u2018Libera Me\u2019 and \u2018In Paradism\u2019 (sic) preceded by an introductory poem, \u2018What My Body Showed Me\u2019, and succeeded by \u2018Morning\u2019. The title\u2019s \u201cpassage\u201d is a movement through imminent catastrophe to a hoped-for new life in healthy relation to the earth. I found myself thinking how intense the sense of release in those final poems might be, in a ritualistic, stage-lit live performance accompanied by music that echoed one of the settings of the mass. In such a performance, the whole cumulative weight of the earlier sections would be throbbing within one as one reached the ending.<\/p>\n

On the page, it takes time and concentration to develop such a living sense of the dynamics of the whole, and of course it can\u2019t be represented in quotation, so I\u2019ll concentrate on the different kinds of brilliance Bury shows in individual poems.<\/p>\n

At the most basic level, there\u2019s the vividness of his phrasing. A few lines into the first poem, the speaker describes standing in a wood<\/p>\n

to absorb one season giving<\/p>\n

birth to another\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the huge trees
\nstripping their own bones clean.<\/p>\n

I find the expression there breathtaking. Putting the line and stanza break after \u201cgiving\u201d rather than after \u201cseason\u201d throws vivifying emphasis on the metaphor of birth<\/em>, defying the usual association of late autumn with subsidence into the deadness of winter, just as \u201cclean\u201d makes us see the bareness of winter trees as a braced, athletic state rather than one of sickness and loss.<\/p>\n

What follows is a surprising twist, an example of Bury\u2019s power as narrator, creating suspense and narrative momentum while making every new step seem packed with fresh significance. As in a ghost story, the speaker feels he\u2019s no longer alone:<\/p>\n

something else<\/p>\n

was moving\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 then stopping
\nthen locking its breath against sound<\/p>\n

What can it be? He listens intently, then feels his own body leaving him<\/em>. He follows it \u201cunwillingly\u201d \u2013 how vividly that one word draws us into the situation, making us feel the conflicting fear, bewilderment and compulsion experienced by the speaker \u2013<\/p>\n

until in a clearing up ahead I could see<\/p>\n

something\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 waiting
\nsilent as the snow<\/p>\n

as if it had been there all along \u2013<\/p>\n

Line end pauses and spaces within lines both convey the speaker\u2019s breathless agitation and heighten narrative suspense. What he sees turns out to be his body, not as it was but as he will have to wear it \u201cif all that can still be saved\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 is lost<\/em>\u201d (my italics).<\/p>\n

Many other poems tell stories. Often electrifyingly strange, evoking both horror films and primitive folk tale, they grip the imagination, stretching it, sometimes bewildering it, but always suggesting the perversity and self-destructiveness of our abuse of the planet. In the cannibalistic \u2018Foie Gras\u2019, children are silently stolen by some kind of monstrous bird woman. She chains them in a cattle shed and force-feeds them to bloat their livers. When she kills them she sells their livers and flesh to their own parents to eat. In \u2018Why I Have Chosen Not to Have Children\u2019, the speaker finds each hen in the hen-house a cinder and her unhatched eggs scalding hot, while cattle give birth to calves as huge black coals that crumble to ash. A repeated motif of the dying, loss or absence of children suggests a vision of environmental catastrophe as a failure in love for the earth and implicitly \u2013 I\u2019d say \u2013 for our own species. Going back to that first poem, the frightening thing that confronts the speaker \u2013 his own future body \u2013 is \u201ca human that had been taught \/\/ nothing of love\u201d. In \u2018Extinction\u2019, Bury imagines \u2018some grace \/ in our unravelling\u2019: that our<\/em> extinction might be the planet\u2019s salvation. However, he suggests that even now love just might win, if imminent catastrophe can make us \u201cunderstand how each cut into the earth \/ is a cut into our own soft skin\u201d, or if the breaking apart of the world can \u201cbreak us open \/ to the subtle miracle of living\u201d, and make us \u201cfinally remember \/ the deep dark of the earth alive in us again\u201d.<\/p>\n

Those last quotations are from in \u2018In Paradism\u2019, the section whose title alludes to the chant as a body is taken out of church for burial. In that context the subsequent \u2018Morning\u2019 must evoke the idea of the resurrection, and seems to imagine a new relation to earth when we wake from our destructive consumerist fantasy. But it can also stand alone as the lyrical evocation of a cleansed vision of life and the earth as one might have it now, a moment of visionary radiance and simplicity in which one feels eternity in the instant and God in everything, in which one is so united to the world that the syntax appropriately makes both \u201cthe cool air \/ lifting out from the valley\u201d and the mind of the speaker<\/p>\n

mix with the blue sky above
\nfilled with nothing and every
\ninvisible moving thing<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rite of Passage<\/em> by Dom Bury.\u00a0 Bloodaxe Books. 80pp.; \u00a310.99.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Danielle Hope, the editor of Acumen, for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 101<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dom Bury\u2019s Rite of Passage is an intense, visionary work, suffused by images of apocalypse. It presents the environmental crisis as not merely stupidly self-destructive but sinful, a perverse violation of the sacredness of earth. The book is structured around the Roman Catholic mass for the dead and the burial rite that follows it. It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dom-bury"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540"}],"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=2540"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2543,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions\/2543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}