I would like to place into your hands a new book by the Brighton based poet Simon Jenner. He has long been well known in the area and beyond as founder of Waterloo Press and director of Survivors' Poetry. This is his first book and is accurately entitled "About Bloody Time".
What do we expect of a great poet: an obsession with death and time allied to a profound love of life in all its concrete detail, a gift for the understanding of character and especially the internal character of the writer himself, an ability to make that detail and those characters echo in the reader's mind. Above all, an acute awareness of the fallibility of the poetic project, of the inability of poetry to speak its desires. All of this combined with a delicate touch for the way that words can sing. It is clear from the evidence of this volume that Jenner possesses all of these.
To begin with something as simple (or complex) as an amaryllis:
And the amaryllis knows its purposes,
as its genes' thumbprint whorls
notches, trembling in small
ratchets as it crooks its
point-making way up;
nicks and tucks at light
climbs in day-limber stages
towards the sun - furled
till the sudden slow horn
breathes a silent call of pollen.
This is a marvellous integration into words of both the image of growth and what impels it, bracketed by the double half-rhyme of "whorls notche"s and "call of pollen" with "small" and "horn" tucked just inside them. The poet too has that thumbprint at the end of his fingers which tap
like a plant
at words sturturous as my
pollen-caught asthma
Both flower and poet manage to grow almost without their crucial air, the plant's genes producing the pollen which the poet's genes almost stop him breathing. The flower "mocks my fingers" two decades' circular rosary' - the "thumbprint whorls" that are the cause of both (notice how apposite is rose-ary here).
furled
till the sudden slow horn
breaths a silent call of pollen
And then the final movement which grants - just - both life and the poem:
Or me, as what climbs drumming out of it
without a breathing pattern to cross
ancient pollen-counts and made the air.
This is also, of course, a poem about writing. The flower grows just as the poem grows - in parallel. Keats writes: "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all" and Middleton Murry notes that the natural, although it may seem easy, involves effort, an effort that can fail. Both flower and poem are natural yet horribly difficult as is the catch of the poet's breath that echoes in the words that catch it. Thus what is so very natural is also almost impossibly difficult "Litter of rhetoric, cell-spent exhaustions / geared to so wastefully.
The poem hinges on the poet"s autobiography which forms the backbone of the book. There are pieces on his father who went from aircraft designer to eye surgeon and professor via a leg amputation which left him with "a limp long incinerated / and a depth charged map of pain". Thus can the poet refer to himself as "the crippled child of a healing man". There are also dedications and some wonderful love poems. Here, for example is "Two"s Flesh, a three-liner:
Our film lay rolled for months -
love lit tight on black. Now, prints,
so late our love's faltered, unravelled in the light
Thus "Desire does the perfect damage". Section II is on music and includes the longer piece "Xenakis" which has already been called a classic. Jenner has long been a music critic and knows this world intimately.
This being English poetry, verbal games and punning are to be expected. This involves a playful seriousness - not an oxymoron. The word is often unexpected in its absolute rightness and certainty. Ravished by the exactness of its placing. This is like playing a game - with the words and with the reader. But games are serious things and you break the rules at your peril. The secret is to get just this side of breaking them, to make the ref. rise the whistle to his lips and hesitate before deciding against and then, to everyone's consternation, even so to score the goal. Here area couple of stanzas on a cold snap in the middle of winter:
All life flees to sub-zero's drained
chromatic poles of black, white
narrowed to snowball fighting laughter
or habit-hunkered death in doorways
scribbled along iron margins of the city.
The line's down. I buffet streaming
scarf and shivers to your flat, light yards off,
blinded by the swirl's swart eternity
notice here particularly "drained", "scribbled" and "light yards" and how such words tighten the text into its own kind of intensity.
This is not only close enough to the breaking of rules but of logic. There is a consummate taking of risks - essential to poetic creativity. In order to compose fragments of experience Jenner fragments experience but only because each fragment points, while still remaining a fragment, to the whole. The architecture here has the confidence of delicacy: "The severed finger relates back to the hand". In this there is the consummate taking of risks essential to poetry.
Of course, this is "difficult" or "modern" poetry and will probably not be reviewed as it is out of fashion. I believe, however, that the world will catch up with it. This little review is to let you have advance warning so that later on you will be able to say "I told you so".
