‘IT PROBABLY HAS TO DO WITH DIVERSITY’
for silver see blue by Glenn Storhaug, 64pp, £7.95, West House Books,
40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN & Five Seasons
Press, 41 Green Street, Hereford, HR1 2QH
This is a lovely book as I’d expect from a joint publication by West House
Books and Five Seasons Press. It opens properly; it’s good in the hand, good
on the eye (meticulous attention to detail); great cover picture and even
the author’s picture is a painting not a photo. There’s only one small thing
that disappoints me: a couple of black-and white reproductions, probably
from colour images, which on this mat paper are so flat as to be dull. I’d
rather have done without them.
But it’s the book everyone would love to have written, freewheeling perfectly
on to the page. The book is one poem, with some titled sections, opening
and closing with an image of cymbals. ‘A meditation on colour’ as the blurb
has it. It also considers journeys, mountains, the sea, a ship, love, Knossos,
nature…
At the top of a page (and nothing is at the top of a page by accident in
a book like this), after his main themes have been floated, Storhaug writes:
if there is any point it probably
has to do with diversity, the
choice as close to infinite as makes
no difference, comparing
one selection with another, one scratch,
stick, stave with another,
forged/foreign coins jamming the appliance—otherwise
cant
or song of the earth cantata, every
beak busy with lyric alarm
(p23)
which tells us something of how he weaves the poem together, slipping between
selections, between the sound and the look of words as well as the logic,
stopping us in our tracks by switching into a foreign language, all the while ‘busy
with lyric alarm’.
Take Venus. As Aphrodite, she ‘shakes / salt water / from her hair / settles
in / on Mt Olympus’. (The ‘Table des Matières’ has it that this is against
shaving the mons Veneris.) Read another three pages and ‘Venus in Transit’ opens
with a ‘slow sweep against star chart’. Astrology? but these are the sweeping
arms of a ship’s radar scanner which a few pages further on swing round and
round like sycamore keys in the wind though the writing has too much finesse
to draw its comparisons so crudely:
(lest sweep of the beam
sow sterile seed
vessels in port
disable all scanners)
abled at sea
parabolic
wings
revolve
resolving
incoherent
scatter
to steer
by astrology
Venus, you see, is also a ship. ‘Day Crossing’ and ‘Night Crossing’ are printed
over a bleached-out photograph of the good ship Venus with, yes, radar antennae
over her bridge. The second stanza of ‘Day Crossing’ is typical of some of
the lyric passages:
sun flash
on pearl wave
curls away
from the prow
‘pearl’ echoing the significant pearl of the opening mediation, ‘lost and found
// in the device of a dream.’
I’m entranced by the shipping sections from the colours of the sea to the
thud of the engines. ‘Travails of Aphrodite’ accounts for the history of
the ship: ‘Gross tonnage 5406 / … / Laid up Norway September 1939. /Seized
by Germans 1940. / Converted for war purposes at the Neptunbwerft’ until
her final breaking at Faslane in 1968.
It’s the section ‘Night Crossing’ that introduces the book’s title, with
its final stanza:
the Greeks
never polished
their silver
and probably neither, if you read the ‘Table des Matières’ again, did the
Minoans so blue may be a code for silver in their wall paintings. Which
leads us in the end to the discovery of another Venus in the section ‘Knossos,
Chaucer and You’, discovered as a Knossos wall painting at the turn of the
century and named ‘La Parisienne’ by archaeologists:
…words unearthed…
how they stongen were
unto the herte when they
saw her first
after 3,000 years (à peu près)
I’ve been looking at the maritime imagery. I could write a couple of pages
about imagery from the natural world. Another reviewer would give you the
mountains (the word written vertically not being so high as the word fell on page 13). In ‘Oxygen:
First Ascent’ Storhaug’s a climber too: ‘face against rock face / wet smell
of granite’. A painter would certainly go for the colours which suffuse every
page of the book; words are colour-coded and played with, as they are here
with ‘maroon’:
[the painter’s maroons
explode to mean signals
report about chestnuts
explain about colour
confusion of cannon
and clearly explaining
how maroons exploding
sound like cannon reporting
Words are handled as if they are physical objects, live things. He turns
them inside out:
‘global’ preferred [Latin globus]
for the name of the summit; [Greek airra]
‘earth’
too radical?
(Yes, it is also as contemporary as this; published in May, it refers to
12th April in Baghdad: ‘Free World marines casting out Satan / save every
memo at his Ministry of Oil.)
I’m aware of Storhaug-as-printer right through this book; you can’t not be:
each page has been so carefully set. But he reminds you deliberately, too:
START OF FOURTH SIGNATURE
AND STILL NOT SITTING STILL
(He started out, remember, meditating.) He often laughs at himself like this,
wondering that Table again ‘Does hand-setting of metal type cure logorrhoea?’ This
book is not set in metal but with
laughter as leaning against the machine
as keys tap into bedrock
free silicon skies
grind up bytes of stars
So when I gather together all these ‘bytes of stars’, what do I have? I’m
not sure. Each time I read the book, I discover connections, enjoy something
new. It’s slippery, doubling back on itself and changing tack. I don’t know
whether I’ll end up properly grasping what Storhaug is doing yet I’ll give
it a good few more evenings: it’s exhilarating that someone’s made a book
like this.
© Jane Routh
2003