is a 20-page chapbook lush in language. Its opening passage
sets the tone:
Roadlake rushes to pours
its pools onto the pathways.
Mercury-mirrors dot them
imaging the trees’ dark sway.
Roadlake rushes to pours
its pools onto the pathways.
Mercury-mirrors dot them
imaging the trees’ dark sway.
This is not a simple scene. In fact, it is actually driven more by alliteration — r-r, p-p-p, m-m, d-d — than its imagistic aspects. The image itself is partially mirrored, and Murray is intently aware that she is indeed engaged in the act of “imaging” in the poem. Moreover, the verb form is deliberately skewed in the first line — shouldn’t it be “rushes to pour” instead of “rushes to pours”? Clearly, this is not merely about a leisurely drive on a country road, but also about poetry and modes of expression. Oh, and what about the portmanteau of “roadlake”? In eight letters we have the whole idea of a body of water flooding itself onto what humans had wished to be circumscribed as separate from nature. And what about “Mercury”? This too could be laden with meaning.
You can perform this kind of textual analysis all through Murray’s
work with equally fruitful outcomes. One section I particularly like is “reed
songs I-IV,” set at Trá an Dóilín in the Conamara town of An
Cheathrú Rua. Trá an Dóilín is a coral beach that is
often also covered in maerl (reddish seaweed/algae). A beautiful spot. Here,
the colors of the beach in one section merge into the colors of a horse in
another:
She had tumbled down the stone walls in flightin frenzythe men caught heramongst the strife the orange flamethe yellow strifethe whitewhite grey and cream : hermane and tail is against the wall
There are so many ways to read this; it suggests something
about oppression, specifically in the gendering of those involved. Also running
through it are themes relating to the muse in poetry, music (“your
double-flute’s song”), the Famine, and the “noise” of mannered civilization.
Perhaps reminiscent in theme (not form) of Carol Ann Duffy’s
“Standing Female Nude,” “The Zeiss” reiterates Murray’s
feminist stance in its turning of the tables on “the male gaze,” the Zeiss
being a brand of medical lenses:
the primitive Zeiss dilatedwith the mathematical implements of your pornographies : meters,lenses[. . .]all these rotated in your skull-disc, and Ispread wide as cut-fruit onto a plate-fallendilatedand captured you.I wondered which of your screens I was playing on?
“Playing on” as in being screened, but more so in the way that
the poet “plays on” the features of language, wordplay. It is the speaker who
accordingly seizes power in this scenario.
The title poem, “Three Red Things,” is noteworthy for its employment
of crisp imagist details as a platform over which to assert a more personal,
subjective position in the world. The speaker is located up against a tree:
“its roots are moving beneath my feet / I am afraid it will tear up from the /
soil’s hungry drinking as” — and that’s it. As what? Do we need to know? No, we
don’t. Murray’s poetry doesn’t owe
us tidy answers. We’ve got the “soil’s hungry drinking as” and it’s a great
phrase and a great ending just as it is.
Another recent Smithereens Press chapbook is Aodán
McCardle’s LllOovVee (2013), readable
here:
McCardle’s bio note explains that he “practices
improvisational Performance Writing, making particular use of the physical body
of writing,” and this work is indeed emphasized as a kind of performance. I can
see it. I like that McCardle has actually incorporated a number of his notebook
pages, reproduced photographically, that play alongside and against the typeset
sections. His handwriting sometimes spells out readable words and other times
devolves into a kind of scribble, but with the trace of the physical movement
of the pen paramount. It is a record, a graphing of instantaneity never to be
repeated.
Having thus preserved it through the wonders of technology,
McCardle adds other layers. For example, a handwritten column of the repeated
word “now” is juxtaposed with a column of the repeated typeset word “then.”
Simple, that, yes. But it is only one small part of a process of repetition
with variation and stripping down of words in order to reveal something about
the ways in which and the reasons why we utilize language. The chapbook begins
with a long typeset passage that wrangles with questions such as
Given the nature of the form LllOovVee takes, it is something that should really be engaged with on its own terms, as the full effect is not captured in this review. But I will say that one possible answer to the questions set out above seems to be located in the title itself, a transcription of a common English-language word that McCardle has sloppily scribbled and strewn across several notebook pages with increasingly emphatic flourishes. It demands to be experienced as much as analyzed.the disgust of egotismthe nothing of writingthe something of writingthe alternative of writing[. . .]writing as other thanto make a line
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