Warner's Arc
There’s a certain type of movement, a certain trajectory of events: a kind of arc, a kind of return. I’m trying to think of examples of this movement. When you see people at a party establish a connection of intimacy, and then you watch them (innocently, interestedly) increase and increase the touching and feeling and intimacy and then suddenly, completely, break apart and create some space between them. This is the moment before they will kiss. They kiss. Or, again: sometimes you go to classical music concerts, and find yourself drifting off, already, in the second movement, to sleep. But your eyes don’t quite shut and the unvarnished cello, brightly coloured under the lights, begins to become quite convincingly a piece of salmon. The salmon is at a dinner party, at which you begin to argue with the hostess about the undercooked salmon. Or the strips of sheet music exposed over the edges of their stands become arms raised diagonally. More arms raise and you are alarmed at the echoes of the Nuremberg rallies, right here in the Bridgewater Hall, in 2011. These dreams of the things you see are worked over and justified and take on more and more reality until your elbow slips from its armrest and the thing is suddenly jolted back to its actuality, its unvarnished celloness or its sheet-musicality. Then again, the trajectory might be there in the divergence and dispersal of prettiness and harmony and rhythm in songs like Radiohead’s ‘How to Disappear Completely’ (and Charles Mingus’s ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’, as my so-called co-editors have just informed me) and the beauty of when they come back together again. But I’m carried away: these are only supposed to be vague descriptions of the standard movement – the default arc – of the poems of Tom Warner.
I guess what I’m getting at is a structure where a thing is settled on, very basically, some tiny subtle decision is made, following which things basically proceed by themselves: one thing leading to another, and that lead-to thing then providing the impetus onto the next. And so on, until suddenly some turning point occurs and the whole thing comes crashing back down to cash in the cheque written in the moment of that original tiny deal. Let me show you what I mean. Here is a little chart to illustrate Warner’s ‘Astacology’, a poem which proceeds through five couplets, each seemingly spawned by its precedent. Here it is, now:
Couplet 1: Warner plays the risky trick of pointing directly at a word: “Astacology is the study of crayfish / and won’t get past Microsoft’s spell-check”. This is rather dry stuff, we think. Is he really writing about obscure words? Oh dear, we think.
Couplet 2: Couplet two continues with “Crayfish, also known as / crodgers, crawdaddies...”, thus drawing us from an impersonal nomenclature into the more personal and personable domain of dialect names and so on…
Couplet 3: …which leads us to a reminiscence of finding one such ‘crawdaddy’ (the use of the wordcements the idea that it was the use of a more personal vocabulary which sparked this reminiscence) (and the “crabby rocks” amongst which the crayfish is found attunes us to the poem’s limited adjectival palette; it continues, as a poem, to be unable to escape this lexical arena).
Couplet 4: In which “cephalothorax” reminds us once again of the poem’s linguistic bent, and the description of the crayfish found intensifies from factual (“laden with eggs”) to evocative: “a spiny tongue, severed...” Which leads, of course, to:
Couplet 5: “I thought of the awkward American girl with large teeth / who corrected my pronunciation of Los Angeles”. And here is the emotional payoff, here that cashing-in of the contract signed at the beginning in which we trusted that this wasn’t going to be a poem about obscure words and only words, here the affirmation that good old sexual-frisson will always win out over etymology and nomenclature and cephalothoraxes – even if this is where it must come from, this scrabbling about amongst the crabby rocks of the disused mill of obscure language, this is what regulates and underwrites our memories and our experiences of the things we get serious about, the stream of experience which is “filled with eggs” so intriguingly – that Microsoft’s spell check, when you get right down to it, can’t compete with American Girls With Big Teeth. I find it hard to read without thinking of Armitage’s startlingly good ‘You May Turn Over and Begin...’; also coupletted, also taking its relatively dry opening and wandering off to come hurtling back to its opening now laden with massive emotional freight (although Armitage’s girl being tall and spindly rather than big-toothed).
I wish I could spend so much time on every poem here. ‘Astacology’, now I come to write so much about it, isn’t one of the best in the collection. ‘Mole’ – which is – displays a reckless confidence in metaphor-making which is a pleasure to behold. The poem runs roughly as follows. The first stanza tries out two possible images for the titular mole, but works them into a scenario: the mole at first appears to be a dropped and velvet purse, and then, disconcertingly, the sleeping body of the hostess of the party at which the purse may have been dropped. The second stanza forecloses on the reality of this garden-party-world, and emphasises this with the violence with which we are returned to moles: “I once found four. Four in a row on a barbed-wire fence / each snagged through the skull”. And here again is Warner allowing each thing to suggest at will: the pelts of the dead moles “slough away to nothing more than an owl might cough up in a filthy nest”; note, rather than a visual simile or metaphor, the creation of another little world, another described domesticity. And then the further jump outward to the moles as “little men [...] crucified / there on the hill’s curved spine”.
The final stanza of the poem tells us “back along the path, the mole is gone”: we suddenly have the situation for which the first stanza was an extended metaphor, and upon which the second was a meditation. There is an implication, then, of metaphor-making and meditation – the tools of poetrying –taking precedence, occasionally, over direct perception; that the shock of a sight or sound may jolt our attention laterally rather than inwardly. There is a sense of things suggesting, instead of ideas, other things; rather than the ideas of the poem inhering in its objects, they inhere in a progression which relies upon the suggestion of one object by another.
But this is not all. The final four lines provide further confusion: the return to the world of the not-a-mole-but-actually-a-purse (“...the mole is gone. / The lush has stirred from her stupor”) unsettles our confidence in our ability to distinguish between what exactly is a metaphor for what; and no time to settle before being moved along again as this (the partygoers’ purse being discovered) illustrates only, in fact, the fact that the dead mole on the path has disappeared: “perhaps” the poem conjectures, “the sun breathed into the mole, filling his pockets” – pockets which are lungs but also, of course, the pockets of a fur coat belonging to a drunken partygoer – “perhaps”, the poem continues (and ends), “he’s rolling again the massed earth beneath him.” And (forgiving Warner the reference to Hill’s ‘Genesis’) there’s some wonderful feeling of this rolling of massed earth being the sense of expansion – of almost sensual unravelling of description into metaphor into meditation – in which this poem luxuriates.
Still present, then, albeit in a complicated form, is this trajectory of self-generation outreaching itself and returning, at last, to its root. And still here this feels very natural, very in sync with both the poem and its (this) reader. The form suggests wonderfully the way the human brain may not clarify and neaten and sort it subject, but simply be moved briskly along to its next. But: every strength can be a weakness. It’s nice to see salmon fillets, sometimes, onstage at the Bridgewater, but it’s difficult to listen to the music at the same time (is this too obscure a reference? Cf. the first paragraph of this review). And here, anyway, the runaway metaphors sometimes draw attention to themselves (hands coming together “in prayer or a dive” we think: yes, yes, good spot, yes and little else. [do we?]) and poems sometimes rely too heavily on their ends (‘History’ wallows in a grandiose sweep which only its last lines do anything to deserve, but come as too little and too late; ‘Wisteria’ is almost wonderful, but alas overwhelmed by the force of its abrupt final line “I could hack it back”, which serves only to crush the subtlety which with Warner can move (cf. the truly excellent ‘Little Things’ in which every object of the poem’s eight lines talks to every other, and together discuss the unmentioned and the underlying – how right it is that it remains unmentioned and underlaid! – so that a story and a reaction to that story is suggested and the title refracts beautifully over the whole thing in its fullness. And also ‘Bricks. Mortar.’ which just read it, basically. And marvel at so apposite and pivotal a title). But, then again, a number of poems sustain wonderfully the shaping force of self-generating images: ‘Sunlight and Rain’ is a poem about driving, and feels propulsed along by its own inventiveness, its own happiness with the discoveries of lovely metaphors, so that “the white noise of rain” comes unexpectedly at first, and then is repeated with striking frequency afterwards.
The sense is that Tom Warner has found a quite deeply human movement with which to shape his poems, and while virtuoso images (I can’t not think of “violins trapped beneath their chins like telephones or windy babies”, now.) and sound-patterning may not be worked into those poems completely satisfactorily, they do such much already, these poems, that this pamphlet is a pleasure.
-- Joey Connolly