|
|
It feels inappropriate to wax lyrical about a first
collection that comprises such taut, spare poems throughout, but in a sense
that's my job here: so I'll try to evoke the compressed power of this book in
some way. 'Radius of Light' is not an easy book to read, despite the apparent
accessibility of its briefest pieces. It does, however, get under your skin,
and create reaction, whether irritation, painful insight, or a sudden sunlit
shaft of euphoria. Like the opening of 'Bee's Edge', 'it stings/ & stings
deep'. This visceral response, reactions felt in the veins or the bones, are
of perennial concern to Auerbach. And bees are quite a presence too, and
echoing the uneasy processes of poetic creativity:
I spiral by
petals
Beware of my
razor point
My proboscis
dips &
Pulls our
primrose nectar
I sink
farther into pollen, my legs covered with granules
Then on to
the next iridescent blossom
('Dance of
the Arrogant Bee')
Corporeality, landscape and language are all profoundly connected in the
poems. To take the body first, poems such as 'Concinnity' look at the
cellular origins of both physicality and phrasing: 'Axons & dendrites: a
body's sentence.//Cells, the red-basalt churn of sound deep within a/
Barrier'. The system linguistic or physiological - admits of slips and dissolution:
'Words break down, discs rearrange themselves/ To forge a deeper mine'. Language
and humanity both are forged from creative tensions, Auerbach seems to
suggest here: the 'cell sounds' that 'clash in the electron rush' with which
this poem concludes.
But the scope of this collection extends beyond the body to the earth itself,
both deep structure and specific location. 'Earth Marks' evokes the earth as primal poet itself:
basalt, slate
torc-curves
of glacial
moraine-lines
drawn
from the core
alluvial-flow, stonemason
the surface
that erodes...
water cascade pushes
slowly into
the forest bed
morass,
butte, carved
and scored by
a needle, slow, planet lines
I'm reminded of the tattooist's needle which scores its text directly onto
the body: 'cuts with a drill's precision/ injects ink near veins' ('Love in
the Time of Dioxin II').
Also, tangentially, of Basil Bunting: 'Words are too light/ take a chisel to
write': the heaviness of poetry that taps into our global core.
Auerbach is not merely an ecologically informed poet, however. Body and
landscape can merge, a perfectly unremarkable trope in itself of course,
except here it is more frequently done with disturbing imagery than peaceful pastoral:
'cracked earth-ribs vault open...ore spilt, veins ripped/ crimson pockets of a
tobacconist's dream' ('Reading the River from a Cessna'). The more you read
'Radius of Light', the more apparent it becomes that there is an apocalyptic
vein in Auerbach's body of work; it pulses uncomfortably and more often than
not heralds dissolution of conciousness, white-out, oblivion on a personal
and perhaps massive scale too. This reaches a kind of climax in the central
poems 'Reflection' ('Will it be black? I will not know/ But I don't want to
be dust/ burned in a fire') and 'When the Door Opens': 'In the heat, white
lines glow,/ Grow wide or shrink/ Or fuse into the distance').
Reference to 'the Door' here, together with allusions to 'lysergic/ and
dopamine-induced/ Visions, swirling circles' inevitably indicates homage to
Huxley's 'Doors of Perception' and its hallucinogenic exploration of the
worlds beyond everyday consciousness. And there is indeed an hallucinatory
shade to many of Auerbach's poems, quite explicitly in the psychedelic
'Phanerothyme' (the word indicates a drug induced mystical experience). This poem comprises a series of
stanzas laid out as prose, unlike the spare lineation of the majority of the
poems. There is a splitting and reforming of consciousness here, a
shamanistic intrusion into other planes; an uncertain return:
If he shook
your hand, would you know if it's him, or his double?
The meeting
of minds melts the fractal space, reverberates through
iron. After
blitzing wildly like an elk, he dreamt of her face in the light,
the cave, and
the shadows. He stirred the wind with stars, against the
backdrop of a
cloudy sea.
Heady stuff. And not to say that such barging into the presence of God offers
much by way of an answer: 'He tries to find the missing link. If there is a
way, it would seem to be through theories of the Absurd'. Theories that don't
necessarily have to be explored through the use of pharmaceuticals, perhaps.
The unpromising sounding 'Herniated Disc' for instance, suggests, along with
other poems, that mundance physical incapacity affords space for meditation:
'I know vanishing/ Points, the way light splits into dark then back/ If you
stare at it too long.' 'The
Spider' offers a similar perspective:
...As I lie on
my back, sundered,
unable to
lift, the world revolves.
Invisible
center up above, a point
recedes into
nothingness. The weight of matter.
Is there a nothingness waiting behind the fractured faade of language;
nothing else? 'Tears close the wind's mouth/ And nothing is heard but
weeping' as Auerbach's translation of Lorca's 'Casida del llanto' concludes
(there are some lovely, eloquent translations in this collection,
incidentally). Interestingly, if Auerbach's volume ends with oblivion, it is
a strangely passionate state and one which might just necessitate a rereading
of the previous poems in the light of its reflected flare more ambiguous
than purely nihilistic; more mystical than conventionally romantic:
Always, you say, & draw near the sun,
the steady
progress
of our hands
across each other.
You search
for the center.
Continue till
you are my body & I
your source
('Drawing Near the Sun')
An experience of communion rather than an Icarus-like fall - though with what and at what cost is
left for the reader to decide.
Sarah Law 2008
|