Jacket 21 — February 2003 | # 21 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
Circles Of ArtChris Emery reviews
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Are these poems navigations, vagaries or nocturnes? Monk’s latest collection shows a continuing foray into the alchemy of language and a reclamation of the visceral soundscapes of loss and celebration. Naming the names in a carnival of appearances and manifestations. Perhaps pure zaum, for those feisty enough to interrogate the relationship to Khlebnikov’s futurist imperatives, but zaum combined with a rich humour, a delight in Northern dialect and idioms, and the here and now of modern kulchur. Though it is perhaps in the realms of a British expressionism that Monk’s work is best situated, and in the performative, punk necessity of a work built out of or upon forms of epiphany. But it would be missing the point to determine Monk’s primary modes in terms of subject; this poetry is all about form, fragment and process. If there is a risk here, it is in the cohesion of these threads and their pressures within pieces and sequences. The poems are at their best in the high-risk environment of invocation. Does it really |
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Matter really it does |
What surprises us here is the moral imperatives of this act of remembrance, a practice which sustains many of the best poems. And here at the outset of the book we find the children’s TV puppet, Looby Loo (a character in the 1950s show Andy Pandy), making a farcical guest appearance in a way which is both cultural memory and the comfort of half-remembered things, supporting us in some final childhood as we face death’s certainties, our only solace facing the unanswered question; and like Ives’ orchestral piece of that name, we share these multiplying threads of disparate music in a cacophony of the present. Aqueous morphine alcohol & fear
The terror of those lines is unmediated, even the fourth line of the stanza plays on inter as ‘between’ bouts of pain, or as an echo of messages moving ‘into’ gardens of pain, or of the sense of this imminent interment. But the music of the stanza is gorgeously polyphonic. The poem, and the sequence, closes with a transfiguration and a command: your doppleganger just rode into town
Transformations occur throughout the book and in the second sequence, Trilogy, ‘Prague Spring’ uses the Golem, a mythical Jewish agent of revenge, to almost heal history. Once again through a series of questions and answers we see this fairytale monster virtually described into existence, revitalising the Czech Republic in the wake of Soviet oppression. What is Golem?
But this figure is strangely incomplete, and in the closing stanza, as if to complete the cycle of history in a magical circle of renewal, we are granted the means of ridding ourselves of revenge and repudiation, or perhaps condemned to repeat the cycles of persecution, revenge and retribution. |
Geraldine Monk was born in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1952. Since the late 1970 s her poetry has been published in many anthologies most recently appearing in the Anthology of 20th Century British and Irish Poetry (ed Keith Tuma, American Oxford). |
Jacket 21 — February 2003
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