Jane Draycott is the reverse of a confessional poet, or even a poet whose persona is one of affable conversational candour. To me, the pleasures she offers are more deeply engaging. In all her books, many of her best poems are haunting, haunted-seeming traps for meditation, full of sidesteps, ellipses and paradoxically intense evocations of absence. The proportion of such poems seems particularly high in this one. Some are enigmatic, others more straightforward. Either way, they seize the imagination by the clarity and economy of their phrasing, the poise of their rhythms and a strange, nervy tautness that gives every word and syntactical turn the urgency of a step on a tightrope. Take the beginning of \u2018The Claim\u2019:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So many came to that portion
\nof the claim, the water not too deep there,
\nand left with tiny grains of gold,<\/p>\n
dust really, and the freezing work
\npainstaking to the bone,
\nall that remained of Eldorado<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Simple words but how much work they do! I\u2019m not just thinking of the vividness and rapid unfolding of the pictures they evoke but of how the common phrase \u2018gold dust\u2019 is exploded in a way that creates a dramatic shift in tone. In line 3 the \u2018tiny grains of gold\u2019 seem to shine in the hand, minute, hard won but beautiful and apparently worth it; \u2018dust really\u2019 dismisses them as valueless. The poem continues through a series of swift imaginative changes, darting to and fro through space and time. Eldorado \u2013 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries\u2019 dream kingdom of unimaginable wealth \u2013 becomes \u2018the land of how-to videos\u2019, broken things that \u2018we\u2019 had dreamed of fixing are instanced as a shattered screen, a heat pump that is \u2018like a heart \/ destroyed by years of insults\u2019, and even as<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
the mind, split into a dozen pieces
\nlike a priceless vase exploded<\/p>\n
on a marble floor, slipped
\nfrom the aristocrat\u2019s hands<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2018The<\/em> aristocrat\u2019, Draycott writes, plunging us into the scene as if it were already familiar to us. The marble floor suggests that the aristocrat is an eighteenth or nineteenth century collector, but at this point there\u2019s a stunning imaginative move into the Chinese or Japanese world pictured on the pot:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (the crane in flight, the little bridge,<\/p>\n the homeward labourers as snow <\/p>\n This is reminiscent of the way Keats moves into the scene sculpted on the Grecian urn in the fourth stanza of his Ode, and all the more piercing for the suddenness with which \u2018as snow \/ begins to fall\u2019 makes it happen.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We return to gold at the poem\u2019s close:<\/p>\n <\/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 In the ancient art with shining seams of precious metal, by the gleaming scars. All you needed <\/p>\n \u2018Gleaming scars\u2019. Draycott\u2019s rapidly unfolding images pull ideas together in startling ways, refreshing perception by breaking down compartments and prizing apart conceptualisations that deaden awareness. She does this here by directly describing the process of kintsugi instead of simply referring to it. The phrase \u2018the ancient art of the broken\u2019 combines punchiness with a vast, vague and ambiguous suggestive reach. So vividly described, the process is made intensely and tantalizingly present to the imagination and, at the same time, as remote from daily life as something in a fairy tale. The last two and a half lines, returning us to the freezing river of the claim, put \u2018the ancient art\u2019 out of reach in a more physical way, with the repeated \u2018all you needed\u2019 sardonically emphasizing the gulf between aspiration and reality. Finally, those \u2018gleaming scars\u2019 bring the animate and the inorganic together in a way that creates a disturbingly unstable sensation, like touching something one expects to be dead and finding it alive or vice versa. What\u2019s imagined as mended with scars of gold isn\u2019t just a broken pot but the labourers and the bird in the living scene that the pot opens onto, and the shattered mind it represents. \u2018Shining seams of precious metal\u2019 doesn\u2019t simply give a more vivid idea than \u2018gold\u2019 would have done, it specifically emphasizes gold\u2019s metallic inhumanity.<\/p>\n The interweaving of ideas, images and sensations within individual poems gives each a richly unstable suggestiveness in itself. Moreover, threads run from poem to poem in ways that will penetrate the reader\u2019s mind more fully on every rereading. For example, the idea in \u2018The Claim\u2019 of seeking gold in a prospector\u2019s claim obliquely connects with the way the previous poem revolves around ideas of claiming charity and seeking \u2018something to inherit\u2019. Called \u2018The Kingdom\u2019, this poem evokes various Biblical references, most relevantly perhaps Christ\u2019s prophecy of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25, \u2018Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world\u2019. These are adjacent poems, but there are plenty of remoter connections creating their own tremors of suggestion; for example, between \u2018the ancient art of the broken\u2019 and the sick children of \u2018Nurse Jameson Thirteen Years on the Juvenile Ward\u2019\u00a0 whose \u2018strength \/\/ leaks from them like a bandaged tap\u2019 or the boy \u2018in whose body the hope \/ of adventure still flowers like honeysuckle over a broken wall\u2019, or between the \u2018shining seams of precious metal\u2019 in \u2018The Claim\u2019 and the way \u2018Behind Closed Doors\u2019 describes Titian\u2019s Diana as \u2018perfect android, immortal machine\u2019. Such connections are far from incidental. Diana\u2019s invulnerability is contrasted with Actaeon\u2019s destruction and the way that involves a transformation of his vulnerable human flesh. Although Draycott makes it seem more as if he\u2019s been overtaken by disease \u2013 fittingly, in a poem imagining the gallery under covid \u2013 in the myth and in Titian\u2019s painting, of course, he\u2019s transformed to a stag and devoured by his own hounds. And the stag reappears in the enigmatically haunting driving poem, \u2018Alone that day I drove, I thought\u2019, where it\u2019s first a deer, then \u2018more like \/ a wolf\u2019 , a free, running life that nobody owns but that is vulnerable to bullets and cars.<\/p>\n Such webs of affiliation can be traced endlessly. Taken individually and exhibited out of context they may seem trivial. Cumulatively and in context they become powerfully suggestive. Through them we seem to glimpse a living body of feelings, thoughts, and associations swimming below the surface of the poem, more and more of which comes into focus once one\u2019s noticed its presence. This is true of the poems most tantalizingly resistant to paraphrase or interpretation as much as it\u2019s true of the more immediately graspable ones. In fact I think the most haunting poems are often the ones in which a definite line of thought does least to tether the associative suggestiveness of resonant statements, either singly or in combination with others. They haunt the imagination or at least they haunt mine because they combine evocative force with a sense of incompleteness, of implications expanding indefinitely but urgently beyond whatever I could read into them.<\/p>\n I suggested at the beginning that these poems were haunted as well as haunting. Although Draycott is so far from putting herself forward as a personality in her verse, her writing does seem to be steeped in feeling, taut with subjective responsiveness, impelled by or sensitive to the particular ranges of emotion suggested by recurring images of illness and hospitals, of things vulnerable, broken or lost, of loneliness, of a yearning separation from something that seems almost intrinsically inaccessible. Such images can have even more force when they appear as it were gratuitously, as in \u2018Rain Check\u2019 when the speaker is advised that<\/p>\n <\/p>\n even in the belly <\/p>\n or in \u2018Magpie\u2019, in which the poet seems to identify with the magpie of the title:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n All I want for my breakthrough \n I have no idea whether or how far the emotions suggested reflect experiences personal to Draycott. The \u2018subjectivity\u2019 they evoke seems to me essentially the subjectivity of our time with its multiple sources of anxiety feeding into each other. Repeatedly, it pits things as they are in our broken world against the hope or dream of another, better, possibly non-existent one.<\/p>\n The emotional range of this book is narrower than that of say Over<\/em>, which sometimes vividly evokes joy and sensuous beauty. However, its art seems to me to cut even deeper, to be even more daringly and intensely evocative, and thereby to offer even more thrilling expressions of artistic power.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Kingdom<\/em> by Jane Draycott. Carcanet. 64pp.;\u00a0 \u00a311.99<\/p>\n I would like to thank Danielle Hope for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 106.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jane Draycott is the reverse of a confessional poet, or even a poet whose persona is one of affable conversational candour. To me, the pleasures she offers are more deeply engaging. In all her books, many of her best poems are haunting, haunted-seeming traps for meditation, full of sidesteps, ellipses and paradoxically intense evocations of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jane-draycott"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2687"}],"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=2687"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2690,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2687\/revisions\/2690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nbegins to fall).<\/p>\n
\nof the broken all could be repaired<\/p>\n
\nthe bird, the village and the snow,
\nand even made more lovely<\/p>\n
\nwas sufficient gold. All you needed
\nwas not to be finished by the cold.<\/p>\n
\nof the storm, your clothes clinging
\nto you like desperate children and down
\nto your naked bones
\n……………………………..<\/span>that\u2019s when
\nyou\u2019ll see them, the ringing mountains
\n……<\/span>and the water\u2019s universe<\/p>\n
\nis to crash the force shield of this screen
\nand be there with you, like the magpie
\nand the still life, grapes painted so naturally
\nit tore the canvas with its beak and desperate claws.<\/p>\n