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Backward Turning Sea
continues Kelvin Corcoran's explorations of Greek landscapes and myths,
overlaid upon a world of dubious international politics and foreign policies,
mixed with tender personal relationships. Paintings also figure strongly:
ekphrastic poems about Roger Hilton's paintings, alongside poems about the
artist's life, St. Ives and more. Two of the sequences 'Helen Mania' and
'Roger Hilton's Sugar' have both appeared as chapbooks since 2004, but it's
great to see them gathered together here with a substantial amount of other
new work, demonstrating why Kelvin Corcoran is still one of our very best
poets: this beautifully written, carefully constructed book of lyric
sequences repays reading after reading and comes very highly recommended.
'Helen Mania' retells the story of the theft of Helen and the subsequent
Trojan war, moving from narrative, to lyric description, to verses that draw
contemporary parallels, with 'regime change', 'smart bomb snapshots of Trojan
bunkers', and a sideswipe at Baudrillard, who wrote that the Gulf War was not
real - Corcoran writes, 'reconstructed it's just as real'. This long poem
ends with lines that show Corcoran's great confidence with the phrasal line
and his tightly controlled music:
Helen you
have undone the world
I taste your
looks, touch your colour
you were
always there, my radiant lexicon.
See how our
boat dips and rises
to our shared
step aboard
noses out of
Pephnos over the endless sea.
We lie
together in the seabed
just rippling
the light with our breath.
This confident musicality is encountered throughout the book, in verb choices
such as 'horses nickering for fresh water'; the alliteration and consonance
of thought-provoking phrases such as 'leaping over the language we speak',
and in the lyricism of ideas such as:
I listen to
the secret conversation of things,
the village
chorus and sea-polished stone
in the light
of the pomegranate and fig.
(from
'Over the calm, clear shining water')
That attention to the detail of
'things' is, ultimately, the proper work of any poet worth their salt, and is
very much worth his. In the prose poem 'Alstonefield' - really a letter from
Corcoran addressed to Peter Riley - we read that 'The warm rain is falling
straight down like curtains of light over the sea', in a time in which 'A
sort of exile is over and everything matters, every detail is transformed'.
That sense of poetry's potential for change is elicited here through observed specificities,
as much as it is through the human relationships Corcoran writes about (in
this case, one poet writing a letter to another).
'The Harbour at Night' also pays 'things' their dues: 'making a pathway of
living things'. Here is another superb lyric poem, again about Greece and
Helen, and specific details of owls and fishing boats and (how's this for an
interesting adjective) 'the anti-clockwise sea'. Throughout this book, the
sea and the Greek islands are the historic backdrop to endless cycles of
invasions, economics, blessings, baptisms, loves, wars, and 'the geology of
great wealth, starry sex and the life of ease'. But they are also a timeless
backdrop, for both myth and the personal, the political and the intimate, mix
with great ease throughout. In one poem the sea 'broadcasts white rage',
transformed into a radio that 'plays dumb, drowned in the pelting air, / and
I launch the box on the bobbing waves / - inside my wife, my children, my
home'. This radio/sea gives voice to Corcoran's characteristically strange,
shifting sensibility; one that moves between these different ways of thinking
/ speaking / representing: 'It's the ancient world calling, are you receiving
me?' and that reminds me that, with poetry as strong as this, Poetry is what remains once you've forgotten what it was
you thought you knew. You must surrender to its music.
The book contains other sequences, 'Alexiares' continuing the Greek themes I
have already described. Part narrative, part imagined biography, part
interview, part mixing of ancient and modern, these are the wonderfully
consistent and powerful imagined writings of an exiled poet during the Peloponnesian
wars. Similar techniques are used in another of the sequences, 'Roger
Hilton's Sugar', which explores Hilton's works, life, back-catalogues,
unpainted pictures, imagined biography, and plays with an artist's interview
and more. It reveals Corcoran's great passion for Hilton, his witty
playfulness, and his ability to move from real things to powerful imaginative
phrasings: 'You see I am surrounded by these things / a medium like breathing
under water'. I particularly like the very personal love poem in this
sequence:
Melanie I
want to say in plain words
how at night
when you're sleeping
and I come to
bed and you fold into me,
my hands
resting on your breasts
drift into
the lovely south of your belly.
[...]
How on earth
did I find you?
Out on the
circuits of stupid chance,
along the
burnt-out motorways of nowhere,
in public
buildings dressed in a suit;
there you're
saying - What did you dream about?
My mouth
hanging open in a new world.
(from
'Melanie I want to say...')
Backward Turning Sea ends with
the sequence 'Ulysses in the Car', again mixing the very personal and
contemporary with the historic, mythic and geographical. The effect is again
strange and defamiliarising in the very best of ways, as in the poem 'When
the Spartans came over the mountain':
Your picture
of the world can be undone,
stations off
the air, iron ore shipped out;
the sky as
blue, the terraces of the sea rise and fall
enough to
break your heart each morning;
we no longer
walked the ground,
the earth a
shadow for another's empire
or the wonderfully provocative poem 'The investigation remains live', which
takes the Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London
on 7 July 2006 as its starting point, and
ends with the beautifully chilling line: 'the investigation is the singing of
the dead'. As in Corcoran's previous works, the living and the dead are one
and the same in Backward Turning Sea (as he wrote previously, the dead are 'invisible everywhere inside
the picture'): poetry is the strange logic of that contract. You really
should read it.
© Andy
Brown 2008
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