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This volume represents the bulk of Elizabeth Bletsoe's
early poetry and provides a companion edition to Landscape from a Dream, her more recent work, published by Shearsman in
2008. Bletsoe is a one-off in the British poetry scene as her work is 'an
anomaly', to quote Tim Allen, falling
as it does somewhere outside of both the spiritual/new-age tradition
and the more language-based experimental poetry of the London and Cambridge
avant-garde. This shorthand is reductive and not entirely helpful but
Bletsoe's wide reading in mythology(ies), botany, history, languages and
psychology informs her work in a manner which fuses the pastoral with the
urban, the analytic/psychological with the mythic, to produce a poetry which
is pretty much unique and therefore hard to classify. Not that you'd
immediately want to classify her work because reading/hearing it read is such
an enjoyable experience in itself. The intensity of her engagement with
language in both written and spoken forms (she's a spellbinding reader) is
both inspired and highly wrought.
The first section in the book is entitled Portraits of the Artist's
Sister and refers to the paintings of the
late Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. While you can see the attraction of
Munch's expressionism to Bletsoe's sensibility, her re-imagining of the
female characters in the paintings are defiantly at odds with much early
art-historical writing on Munch which favoured the fallen-world scenario in
which Eve/Pandora was the temptress and cause of all the worlds' problems.
There is a feminist, almost-polemical thrust to these poems - similar to that
in her engagement elsewhere with the heroines of Hardy's novels - but what
she does with this, in terms of the power and imagery of her work is to
produce poetry which engages the reader at a visceral as well as an
analytical level. There's also a lot of humour in her writing, especially
when engaging with that 'archetypal' or perennial subject of the relation
between the sexes:
when you
pulled me
from the mud,
Omega,
and woke me
touched me
with a fern
frond
a green
interrogation mark:
I could smell
disaster,
the gunpowder
between us
(from 'Alpha and
Omega')
This sets the scene for the fireworks to follow and yet the enjoyment of the
writing is as much to do with the way Bletsoe meshes different kinds of
vocabulary as with the story she is 'retelling'. Take this crisp
encapsulation of the early days of intoxication where the lyricism of the
imagery is both part of a long tradition yet very modern. The reference to
the milkshakes sets it roughly in time-if-not-place and also raises a smile.
we drank
different coloured milk-shakes
walked by the sea for hours
brightness
fell from the air
and the
golden pillar of the moon
simmered on
the water
(from
'Alpha and Omega')
She mixes comedy with emotionally
powerful, sometimes overwhelming, feelings and the final lines of the poem
get to the heart of the issue which touch on those almost taboo areas of
emotional intimacy and control which many writers skate around or make light
of:
but then I
caught you
talking with
a SNAKE
you said that
he was interesting
that there
was nothing in it
no matter -
I squashed
his head under my foot
while you
were busy
among your
many orchards
I love you
now, Omega
now you are
safe and dead
but it was
when you said
it was when
you said
you loved me
-
that I feared
you most
(from 'Alpha and Omega')
This is powerful stuff, sexual-jealousy,
torch-song material that you could imagine Ute Lemper, for example, doing as
a number. And yet the challenge of the analysis, the upending of tradition,
is as powerful as the emotional intensity of the language and its incantatory
drive.
In 'Moonlight', from the same section, the central female 'subject' is
transformed from a 'passive agent' to a character 'with agency' to use E.P.
Thompson's term, a player whose mystery and femininity is nevertheless
powerful, if dangerous and not always to be trusted. The subconscious is
indeed a dangerous place and while Bletsoe plays with notions of the 'femme
fatale' and 'otherness' the struggle for control is emotionally charged and
intense:
she is now
beyond the pale
where
blackness is thick, like fur
and the great
grey-faced owl
murders, a
moon on wings -
this joy
drinks deeper than delight
The final stanza is assertive and more calm but its imagery is deeply
original and powerful nonetheless:
loosely
shrouded in delicious white
not a ghost,
but a Sister
she sails her
broken eggshells
over an ocean
of night.
Wow!
Again, it's the mix of analysis and emotional intensity, delivered via a
startling and highly unusual image that creates the effect, a shiver of
delight. Why is what Bletsoe does so much more powerful and real than so much current poetry which utilises imagery
in a 'new-age' context?
In 'Vampire', the opening lines create the dramatic backdrop for conflict -
'I come from a darker mountain/than yours,/a colder fjord' - and then moves
into incantatory mode which leaves Bram Stoker standing:
take my hair,
my red hair
make it a
bright bonfire
let the
flames creep over you dancing
eating up
your little love, your offerings
you bring to
the altar of my body
and he said
too wild your music is
and he said
yes he said yes
yes I will
The intoxication of the language is in tune with the nature of the seduction
yet you just know it's all going to end in tears. It's the strength of the
writing, its theatrical expressiveness, which makes this material so powerful
and the reader simply wants it to go on for ever.
The other major section in the book is entitled The Regardians and uses the idea of 'the angel' in a more or less secular sense but as a way
of mixing the archaic with the modern and of creating startling and
unexpected moments of 'epiphany'. In 'The Leafy Speaker', for example, we get
this:
Angel,
you break
through the hedge
in your
wide-brimmed hat
and call to
me:
a startling
epiphany
though your
feet seem solid enough
on the unremarkable pavement
Although the subject is mythical its materiality is real enough (those solid
feet! an amusingly 'undermining' notion) and the incantatory charge of the
language is what fuels the readers delight. In 'The 'Oary Man' Bletsoe mixes
shamanic ritual with 17th century radical traditions and an
awe-inspiring reference to the night sky. The language embraces both the
apocalyptic and the raw reality of a cold Christmas evening in the here and
now. The way Bletsoe brings all this material together and makes it work is
quite astonishing because in the hands of a 'new-ager' this could be an
appalling mess.
in apparent
waste land
the spade
rings on hard earth
a page stays unwritten in my head,
the slow
course of seeding fresh perceptions
draws us to sleep;
secret works
being wrought underground
in rhizomes,
corms and bulbils
the poem
the swollen belly
ideas
thrust into
consciousness
by the radical English dreamers
who claimed your authority:
the Fiery
Roll inscribed with blueprints
for a world
turned upside down
We are at once in the world of Christopher Hill and the Ranters, Levellers
and Diggers of the English Revolution, while also being given access to the
processes of artistic creation via 'natural growth' and these 'underground'
radical movements. This is all
held together by Bletsoe's method of 'incantatory organisation', something
which is especially evident when you hear her work read out. Once having
heard her read it's very difficult to re-read these poems without hearing
them in her own voice and that's not something you could say about every
poet, or would wish to for that matter!
In the section disarmingly entitled Individual Poems, there is a quieter form of observation at work,
the material is often more fractured, diary-based observation featuring
alongside some delightful asides yet the work is still filled with an
intensity of experience where multiple forms of knowledge jostle with the
everyday. Bletsoe has a glorious ability to incorporate the colloquial with
more specialised lexicons and yet integrate disparate materials in a manner
which is entertaining and also makes you think and want to learn:
entero-
morphia:
new weeds
make delicate
shapes;
stars,
fern-boats,
lettuce,
string
these 'fontal
truths'
& a pair
of mallards
breasting
the waves
very
jollily
(from 'Watchet')
This is poetry 'of place' but it's so
lightly touched and well-observed that it provides a counterpoint to the
prevailing dark materials and emotional power. Which isn't to say that that
there is no strange material in this section. In 'Notebooks Retrieved from
the Sea', for example, the
observation is incorporated into a more mythic mode which often has a dreamy,
film-like, surreal quality:
Dreamt I woke
to find a woman
reading aloud
from
a book with
no words,
holding her
right hand in greeting
to the sun
and the sea.
The sea
turned into a carnival,
became a multitude
and a horned
man
with caprine
eyes
embraced me,
saying:
'you are now,
and have always been
one of us'.
However Bletsoe utilises myth or history or the stuff of nature in her
writing it's the power of the language itself which creates its intoxicating
effects, not some belief system which we are being sold or tempted with,
however sophisticated the salesperson. Her work is the genuine article
because its power comes from her engagement with language and with the world.
Pharmacopoeia, the final
section in the book, is prefaced by a quotation from the late poet Geoffrey
Grigson - 'we cannot emotionally separate a flower/from the place or
condition we find it in'. Each
poem is prefaced by the title of a particular plant, including both English
and Latin names. As indicated by the Gregson quote, this is 'poetry of place'
yet by giving details of the qualities of individual plants, Bletsoe, who
knows a lot about homeopathy, suggests mini-narratives which makes these
delightful pieces more than the usual 'nature appreciation' type of poem. In
'Stinging Nettle (Urticus diocia)',
for example, we get this:
'beset with
little prickles'
flagella for
the
subjugation
of wayward
flesh
though
makes a good thick
soup
heating &
rich for the blood
So as well as natural history we are given snippets of social history,
nutritional values and other more unusual functions which can be found for
various plants! Bletsoe herself said, in an interview with Tim Allen in Don't
Start Me Talking (Salt, 2006):
I read Pharmacopoeia to one group and a very straight, shy
Irish woman
was smiling behind her hand until the end when
she burst out
laughing and said 'Oh, that's really filthy!' -
apparently
starchy botanical terminology can be subverted
into
something quite erotic.
Pharmacopoeia, in tandem with Landscape
from a Dream, now makes available a
substantial body of work from one of the most interesting poets currently
writing in English. Although she's not one to hug the limelight, despite
being a fantastic reader of her poetry, Elizabeth Bletsoe deserves much wider
recognition than she has so far received and I hope the publication of this
splendid book will go some way towards making that outcome more likely.
©
Steve Spence 2010
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