Friday 11 April 2008

Bill Gilson reviews Ladder of Hours by Keith Althaus

Ladder of Hours;
Poems 1969-2005
by Keith Althaus
(Ausable Press, 2005) 176 pp.
www.ausablepress.org


Keith Althaus, in a short prose piece on the cover of his second book of poems, Ladder of Hours, describes how he began, some forty years ago:
"I began to write in the simplest and most straightforward language because I thought it would be easy. And because I had no audience, any attempt to impress or seduce the reader with rhetoric would only come back to me. Years later, by the time I realized how difficult it is to write simply, I was hooked on the promise of its reward".
“To write simply” -- the phrase holds great appeal, both for poets and readers, yet complexities swarm when you ask what it means. So much of what we hold to be first rate isn’t written simply, and so much of what is, isn’t good.
In Althaus’s case simplicity starts with a pared-down form based on the sentence. ‘First Memory’ begins


The taillights disappearing
into the black wood of the hill
mark the end of my reach,
the limit of my knowledge.
It’s the kind of beginning that might take you into an ordinary poem, possibly heading towards flatness. But here is where he goes with it:
Before that there is nothing.
Sometimes I am awakened by the slamming
of brakes, or the jerky shifting of gears
going uphill, the clattering of an empty trolley
through a deserted, unlit intersection.
Sometimes I am filled with enormous sadness
for no reason, as a car veers off up ahead
or a city bus slows to make a turn farther
and farther behind me.



There is unexpectedness, even surprise, in the way the reader is carried quickly from a thought accompanying an image into a bodily experience, brakes slamming, gears juddering, then through a dark intersection opening into a feeling, an “enormous sadness” which accompanies, perhaps is caused by, the sight of traffic, turning vehicles diminishing. All this in thirteen short lines, three sentences.

To readers used to poems in which words are juxtaposed in defiance of their everyday meanings, or to poems of deliberate ambiguity and fragmentation of syntax, an Althaus poem when viewed quickly can look like adequate prose split into phrases. The method risks flatness, and requires that the poem be so tightly constructed as to hold itself together as if with magnetized parts.
Many poets have written in this style. It is an obvious way to begin, but the difficulty to which Althaus refers sets in immediately, in that the space to move is actually more restrictive than that within rhymes and meters. The sentence, in which we are so at home and which normally does much of the work for us, can constrain, resisting the poet’s need to startle and enthral.
Oddly, along with Althaus’s ability to work within such tight spaces has come one of the strangest and most compelling aspects of his work: his insistent returnings to a small number of themes or subjects. Old friends (lost, dead, alive but living elsewhere), childhood (toys, early rooms, school), travel (often solitary moments with or without his wife and son), past jobs (laborer on a pig farm, tree trimmer, dump-sticker salesman), New York City in the ’60s (student at the Art Students League, booze, drugs, loneliness), sleep (waking, dreams, insomnia) ... the list in its entirety would not be much longer, and would not seem all that unusual or even that original. But what matters are the details, the odd particularities in what is noticed, and the depths he is able to reach while maintaining a luminous clarity.


A NIGHT LIKE THIS
On a night like this
you can imagine
the end of the world:
the power out, high winds and snow,
the earth changed so completely
in a matter of hours.
Total silence of manmade things,
the plows and sanders useless.
The weight of the sky
now equal to that of the land.
And the flame of the candle
you carry so frail it sways
in each breath, and with each step,
a butterfly at rest, moving its wings,
the last thought of those you’ll miss,
alive in your hand.



Here we have a pure Althaus moment: the delicate point where time seems to pause, where the smallest movement -- one’s breath upon a candle flame -- seems to hold the possibility of a fateful turn.

The poems in Ladder of Hours are not dated but the arrangement gives a feeling of at least a rough chronological order. A poem such as ‘The Feather’ comes early in the book. The “I,” the Althaus voice, tells of a man mowing the grass next to a garden and a cornfield where a scarecrow wears the man’s “cast off clothes.” Nearby a “jack o’lantern sits on top / like the brains of the compost heap, / ageing fast, thinking deep.” A wind which “doesn’t care if it is loved or not” moves among rotting vegetables, flowers gone to seed. In a furrow, which is a “runway for the slow takeoff of pheasants,” the man finds a feather. “Among husks and stubble” he hunts for the pheasants’ nest, then for another feather. Finding neither, he looks down at the feather in his hand --
"this was lost alone,
in flight, or momentary rest.
I pocket it: a note
to be read later."
The tone, with its description of a bit of routine labor, of a man poking curiously in the detritus, of the sense of his looking for something he probably won’t find, and his falling short of some ultimate explanation, together with the light touch of absurdity and its hint of self-deprecating laughter, will be at once familiar to readers of Althaus’s first book, Rival Heavens. Ladder of Hours is rich with such moments and poems; but as you move on through the book you sense that Althaus’s confidence and technical control have deepened, and like a veteran jazz musician he can now take you farther into the abstractions of feelings without your getting lost.
In the lovely poem, ‘For Mary Hackett’ the texture of the language shades towards an abstractness that nevertheless maintains precision. [Hackett (1906-1989) was an American painter; Althaus has written several essays about her work.]


FOR MARY HACKETT
The most beautiful thing is a year:
its green, gold, and white wheel
turned by the wind and rain,
by the breaths of strangers
in a crowd beside you,
kept spinning by hands
lifted off of beds in unseen
benedictions of farewell.
Dry ice bubbling in the lake;
late summer, the brown water
boiling at the end of the dock.
Lost hours, watching a sunfish
defend a rock and a stalk of algae
from a school of cruising bass.
Days left empty as the pages
in an angel’s diary.
And the long winds of fall,
which are the sighs
of people in the city,
cooling breaths that dry the words scraped
on the stiff crepe of a corn husk
by a pin dipped in blood.
Then snow fine as dust
clapped from erasers
falls through the air
sparkling, coating
the ground like gesso,
with the slow
steady sound
of brushstrokes.



The “breaths” in the first and third stanzas appear again and again in Althaus’s work, obsessively, sometimes twice in the same poem. It is as if the word were as necessary to the work as breathing is to the body. Sometimes visible in cold air, “breaths torn to shreds, / the unsaid returning / to the alphabet” (‘In Traffic’ from Rival Heavens); or imagined, “Down in the street / breaths like souls ascend / from bodies trapped / between the seamy underground / and frozen heaven” (‘In the City’); or part of the physical intimacy of language, “and long chains of hills / in a few breaths and syllables, / these names / in tandem rattled off / on the late news” (‘Landscape’).
Throughout Ladder of Hours there runs a saving laughter, an affectionate bemused and loving regard for the absurdity of the difficult present, and for heroically comic struggles once waged. In ‘Self-Portrait in Pigshit’ the poet remembers how once, years ago, he “crouched on those flyblown boards / laid across the tops of the pens” installing plywood ventilation panels in a “finishing house” on a pig farm. “If a nail fell into the shit below / you’d have to climb down / and get it otherwise a pig / might eat it and die.” And, of course, lunch break: “... stinking, though we’d / hosed our boots / and shed our coveralls, / we were still barely welcome / at the diner down the road ...”


The young man smiling,
standing with his crew
in the doorway of Nellie’s Cafe
greeted by a chorus
of catcalls and ribbing,
does not exist anymore.
Those cells are buried in the air.
Yet around his visage
there’s a glow
as if someone has been breathing
on his picture, trying to bring
it closer, make it clearer.




There are longer poems in Ladder of Hours, some with three and four parts, and in these Althaus extends the meditation while holding to his tightness of language and sureness of touch. ‘Treasure Island’ describes his reading to his son at bedtime, “Beside me / on the couch, / finally quiet / after running all day; / his knees stick out / like a pair of bruised peaches”. The poem modulates through scenes from the book, the pirate ship, Jack Hawkins and the Squire and Long John Silver, through a memory of a “dealer’s pad” in New York City where the man who played Jack Hawkins in the movie awaits his heroin connection; the final stanza returns to the room where the sound of rain “brings music, / changing tempos, slowing”, and a father’s silent wishes and fears for his son as the son begins to fall asleep --
a shiver runs through him,
then me. It’s late.
I mark our place.
Ladder of Hours is a book of subtle humor and quiet astonishments, with rarely a note out of place. Here is one more small example of its beauties:


POEM
Across gravel that has lost
the secret of the mountain,
dust which hides in an insect’s voice,
through what’s left of the tattered shade
that stunted love
so it could stay in a world
guarded by toy soldiers,
a boy leads you to your shadow.




Keith Althaus is an American poet living and writing on Cape Cod with his wife the artist Susan Baker. One of his poems is included in the Bloodaxe anthology Soul Food, where the note on him reads: 'His conversational poems are philosophical in spirit, persistently enquiring after what a person can know and showing how insight into everyday life can transform the world. They take us into numinous territory we didn't know was there.'

Bill Gilson is an American poet living and writing in the Lake District with his family.

This review was first published in the magazine Tears in the Fence (editor: David Caddy).

Tuesday 8 April 2008

Linda Gordon reviews Earth Shattering: ecopoems

Review of Earth Shattering: ecopoems, edited by Neil Astley
(Bloodaxe Books, 2007), 256 pages, £9.99
ISBN 978-1-85224-774-4. American readers can order this book from Amazon.co.uk.


This is a timely and wide-ranging anthology of poems from Bloodaxe Books. Its theme is the Earth, and our continuing and ever-deepening environmental crisis. It is not preachy, or full of negativity. The poets in this anthology say things as they are, from the heart, without flinching.

Fe years
Yu hav been fighting wars an destroying de scene
An now dat yu dying
Yu start turn Green
Benjamin Zephaniah, from ‘Me green poem’.

Earth Shattering contains an astonishing range of contributions. It includes works by significant writers from around the world, both past and present - from William Wordsworth to Ken Saro-Wiwa to Pablo Neruda to Margaret Atwood. As Neil Astley says in the book's introduction: "It is the first anthology to show the full range of ecopoetry, from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to 21st-century Native American poetry."

The book is divided into categories, making for comfortable browsing, if not necessarily comfortable reading. From the category labelled ‘Rooted in Nature’, we read:

The birds have vanished into deep skies.
A last cloud drifts away, all idleness.

Inexhaustible, this mountain and I
Gaze at each other, it alone remaining.

Li-Po, ‘Reverence-Pavilion Mountain, Sitting Alone’.

(Translation David Hinton)

And here is an excerpt from the ‘Unbalance of Nature’ category, which addresses interference with the processes of nature, and the effects of pollution:

The fish faced into the current,
Its mouth agape
Its whole head opened like a valve.
You said ’It’s diseased.’
Seamus Heaney, from ‘Augury’.

The words of each and every poet are potent - speaking out clearly on behalf of the earth and its myriad life-forms. Reading one of these poems a day is a moving experience, guaranteed to strengthen one's resolve to be a part of the solution, not part of the problem. But, for me, the anthology's greatest impact lies in the sheer range and diversity of poems - giving a sense of a great and unstoppable environmental movement, with the potential to change the world.

Throughout the book, there are fascinating contextual notes and biographical details about all the poets – plus there are some carefully placed prose pieces, such as James Lovelock’s ‘What is Gaia?’ and Caroline Tisdall’s description of Joseph Beuys’ seminal Coyote performance. This greatly enriches the reading experience, makes one look again, think again - and draws one into further and deeper exploration.

Earth Shattering, with its concerted voices, takes us to that place where we know the truth of what that old Native American chief is supposed to have said: "... we are a part of the Earth, and the Earth is part of us."

Linda Gordon is an environmental artist who makes site-specific work in all parts of the world. See http://www.lindagordon.org.uk/ and http://throughstones.wordpress.com/ for more information about her work.

Review first printed in Landscape & Arts Network Journal No.43, Zen Edition. For more information go to http://www.landartnet.org

Saturday 5 April 2008

Jonathon Porritt reviews Earth Shattering: ecopoems


Review of Earth Shattering: ecopoems, edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2007).

256 pages. £9.99.
ISBN: 9781852247744.
www.bloodaxebooks.com

Any poetry anthology, in any field, inevitably owes something to those anthologies that have gone before it. But with
Earth Shattering, Neil Astley has set out to do something rather different – not just moving us well beyond the canon of ‘nature poetry’ (which a number of other anthologies have also sought to do over the last few years), but by digging much deeper into the complexities of the historical relationship between humankind and the living Earth that sustains us, reflected in a highly contemporaneous and politically relevant way That will certainly appeal to environmental activists who will already be familiar with many of the poets featured in Earth Shattering. But they will discover a whole lot more than that in this astonishingly eclectic and wide-ranging anthology.

For one thing, Astley sets out systematically to fill some of the yawning gaps in our usual range, particularly regarding eco-poetry from the United States. For me, this was a real delight. Over-familiarity with the work of ‘old faithfuls’ such as Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder would appear to have rendered me deaf to poets such as Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and W.S Merwin, let alone a whole slew of Native American poets including Linda Hogan and Joy Harjo who are such subtle, fresh voices, covering an extraordinary emotional range.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the dominant tone here and in the anthology as a whole is unavoidably elegiac, with many poems focussed on both historical and current loss of species, habitats, special places and ‘right relationships’. Cumulatively, the power of that indictment is overwhelming, the pain and anger intense. There are far fewer poems simply celebrating the beauty and mystery of the Earth and its teeming citizenry, even though the two sections that do focus more on this inspirational quality (The Great Web and Force of Nature) are amongst the strongest in the anthology, with excellent commentaries from the editor.

This has to be one of the great strengths of
Earth Shattering. The work of each of the poets featured in the anthology is properly contextualised, the significance of their wider work briefly explained, and hugely helpful insights provided into motivation and, occasionally, interpretation. For the most part, Neil Astley relies on his own expertise in providing these ‘extended footnotes’, but I particularly enjoyed the way he draws on other writers (such as Jonathan Bate whose wonderful Song of the Earth Astley cites as his own most important influence) and other poets to provide additional insights. Sometimes he draws on the poet’s own commentaries of their underlying philosophy, especially when this has relevance to the collection as a whole. For example Mary Oliver’s reflection on her own poetic impulse (‘the man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded. I say this even as wilderness shrinks beneath our unkindness and our indifference. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form’) clearly doubles up as a leitmotiv for many, many of the authors represented here.

In this whole area of reflection and commentary, Astley’s editorial touch seems very sound. There may be rather more questions both about the categorisation of contributors (with considerable overlap between different sections) and indeed the choice of contributors. This may sound churlish, but there were a surprisingly large number of poems that I just found very hard work as in producing almost zero reward for considerable time invested. And given that this is a substantial collection, I found myself towards the end either dipping in or tracking contributions from poets that had really caught my attention rather than crunching each and every individual item.

But there were so many completely new discoveries as to more than make up for the occasional ‘what the hell is that about?’. Perhaps it just reflects my own current mood (one of growing anger at the fact that what we are doing to the Earth today we are doing in full knowledge, with no conceivable excuse of ignorance or uncertainty as to consequence), but I was particularly struck by those poets who explicitly link environmental devastation to the ongoing oppression of communities and whole nations – Jayne Cortez writing about the Ogoni people in Nigeria, for instance, or Ernesto Cardenal reflecting on the impact of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua.

These are certainly some of the more polemical contributions, unapologetically setting out to stir anger and action – as Oodgeroo, the first published Aboriginal poet, puts it:

But time is running out,
And time is close at hand,
For the Dreamtime folk are massing
To defend their timeless land
Come gentle black man
Show your strength;
Time to take a stand.
Make the violent miner feel
Your violent
Love of land.

But the heart of
Earth Shattering lies in one grand philosophical enquiry threaded throughout the collection: to what extent are we destined, as a species, to rediscover a proper sense of co-habitation, of deepest intimacy with the living world – or are we now locked into the role of alien presence, or hateful cancer, until the final reckoning? Theodore Roethke’s ‘Moss Gathering’ or Pattiann Rogers’s ‘The Laying on of Hands’ beautifully capture that essential conflict between our non-negotiable ‘naturalness’ and our problematic and habitually destructive separateness.

The enquiry remains open-ended – just! But as Neil Astley so eloquently reminds us, poetry has a special, possibly unique role to play in persuading us to confront such conflicts far more honestly than we are currently inclined to do:

As our world’s politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards Eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But
Earth Shattering shows that the power of poetry is in the detail, in the force of each individual poem, in every poem’s effect on every reader. And anyone whose resolve is stirred will strengthen the collective call for change.


Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/, Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/; and author of Capitalism as if the World Matters; (Earthscan, revised pbk edition 2007) available through Forum for the Future website.

Review reprinted from
Sofia #87 (March 2008) by kind permission of Jonathon Porritt and Sofia editor Dinah Livingstone. See http://www.sofn.org.uk/sofia/87sofia.html

American readers can order copies of Earth Shattering: ecopoems from Amazon.co.uk.