This is Jacket 12, July 2000 | # 12 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
David Kennedy reviewsComplete Travels, by Martin Corless-Smith(Sheffield: West House Books, 2000), pbk, £9.95, ISBN 0 9531509 3 3 |
The English Pastoral was officially pronounced dead over twenty-five years ago in the introduction to John Barrell and John Bull’s Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse. Barrell and Bull argued that ’The separation of life in the town and in the country that the Pastoral demands is now almost devoid of any meaning’ and concluded by asserting that ’now and in England, the Pastoral ... is a lifeless form, of service only to decorate the shelves of tasteful cottages’. In the dismal days of the British ’Seventies, this sounded indisputable but in recent years it has started to seem that Barrell and Bull were rather hasty in laying out the body. |
for now it is
Readers who are experts in church music will be able to say whether ’Worcestershire Mass’ follows a specific devotional form but there is throughout the piece - and the book as a whole - a powerful sense of the choral, as sounds, images and voices slowly aggregate and gather only to diminish and begin again. In this context, perhaps there is another smart pun being made on ’mass’. The passage also demonstrates that Complete Travels collects writing which is often genuinely charming as well as being completely engaging. It may be because I have just been re-reading Thomas Campion, Michael Drayton, Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell but Complete Travels seems to me to give a new take on a recognisable aesthetic landscape. The book’s final section, entitled ’The Garden. A Theophany or ECCOHOME A dialectical lyric’, is particularly fine in this respect in its deconstruction and reassembling of another old English form, the mask. For once, the book’s blurb is absolutely correct in its comment that ’these poems seem always to demand performance but it is a performance they also for sheer pleasure of unruliness resist’: Just as it ends
However, I don’t mean to imply that Complete Travels is irretrievably embedded in an English context or that readers need detailed knowledge of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English poetry to appreciate it. Corless-Smith clearly takes pleasure in and inspiration from older poetries’ music and intellectual rigour and in a wider tradition of writing about landscape, place and nature but his compositional methods confound assumptions about what it means to respond to a tradition. At the same time, his borrowing from and evocation of older poetries transcend expectations about what we are obliged to term linguistically innovative poetry. And this, in itself, is enough to define his originality. |
West House Books are available direct from: |
Jacket 12 Contents page |