BROKEN VOICES

Review from Acumen

Some time ago, in Acumen, I wrote in praise of David Pollard’s Self-Portraits. [His new volume], Broken Voices is less precisely focused than Self-Portraits was; indeed its considerable variety of subject and form is one the most engaging things about it. Some poems are much preoccupied with mortality, others are dedicated to ‘joy’; there are a number of poems on music and others which, I suppose one would call philosophical. There are short poems and long poems. Many are in free verse in which speech rhythms are ver evident; there ia a series of ‘Odes’ which “follow the Keatsian formula: ababcdecde and iambic pentameter” (p.122). There are poems on Ancient Egyptian subjects, on St. Thomas Aquinas and Egon Schiele, and much else. I have space here to only to a few poems. My own interests led me to pay particular attention to the poems on music. These are, to attempt a crude ‘classification’, of three kind: (a) those which are essentially ‘biographical’ in approach, such as ‘The Dark Fiddler’ (on Delius), ‘Handel takes a Gigue back to Germany’ and ‘Britten’; (b)  those which seek to translate into words the experience of hearing a particular piece of music, e.g. ‘Bach ‘Cello Suite NO.6’ and (c) poems which address the actual playing a particular instrument, such as ‘Rodrigo at the Piano’ and ‘A Virginall’. This last is a particularly fascinating piece, a poem which delicately explores (as many seventeenth-century poems did, not always delicately!) the erotic implication of the act of drawing music from an instrument. Such implication are inherent in many of the words used in the s=discussion of the techniques involved in playing various instrument, words such as ‘touch’, ‘fingering’, ‘tonguing’, ‘stroke’, and the like. The ‘virginal’ is sometimes said to get its name from the ‘virgin’, as it was an instrument often played by young women; an alternative etymology suggest the name is derived from the virga – (a rod) in reference to the wooden jacks of the instrument. The first of these etymologies (correct or not) was often invoked (explicitly or implicitly) by poets and to==other writers during the years of the instrument’s greatest popularity (c.1560-1670). Such an association, through which a male musician playing the virginal ‘becomes’ a man attempting to seduce a young woman, clearly underlies Pollard’s poem (p.44), as is evident in the poem’s opening lines, where the ‘speaker’ is inescapably make, the instrument female:

Oh I have plucked her, tongued her white ivories
against the air, Dowland I think it was, October
winding the chordal branches of her soundings
twined into subtle modulations of high breeding.
But ‘he’ wants more than playfully flirtatious courtship:
Yet I demanded more. She was too painted,
inlay too delicate for my fingerings;
…
//
She was too gentle for my temperings,
feathered with beauty of the retiring kind,
//
A Tenth Pavanne she did with me
slow as the fire in human veins allowed
in duple meter as the custom is, then
fell into her rest of broken heartstrings

Elsewhere ther are powerful poems devited to St. Thomas Aquinas (Thomas’) and Egon Schiele (‘Egon’). Both – theologian and painter -seek to articulate a ‘vision’ (the word if=s mine not Pollard’s) out of a very material world. St. Thomas, in a retrospective account of his life declares  of his youth as a Dominican Friar

The stubble streets and jeers
are now my calling;
the nervous play of dryness on the tongue
and all the smells bad breath allows.
I tread the leather gauntlet of each step
into the preaching and the poverty

Schiele develops his art in a Vienna full of

taverns, cafés rich with torte,
with Eros and the kind of decadence that beckons
thunder foreseen and culpable, a play of shadows
and pretensions among its baroque and spires.

Schiele is seen as “victim of himself, his gaze / that mirrors the divisions of his won self hate / onto the canvas in an ecstasy of loss”.

The more I read of his work, the more I feel that David Pollard is a poet of real substance, a voice which deserves to be better known, more widely read than perhaps his is now.

Glyn Pursglove [Acumen}

 

Review from Agenda

In 2011, a reviewer of David Pollard’s On Risk of Skin suggested that ‘any one of these poems merit the attention of at least six hundred words.’ The challenge then was to do with an immensely ambitious protean diversity, taking in Keats, Blake, Hölderlin, Celan, Mallarmé, Oppen and philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche to Heidegger. The simplest way to understand what is going on in the five parts of Broken Voices is to look at the language of the poems.
In the first part, ‘The chisel chases down the letter’s edge/dispelling chaos’ ‘The Tombstone’ tells us, quoting Bunting’s Briggflatts to emphasise its point that ‘Pens are too light/Take a chisel to write.’ The ‘chaos’ here might be the distracting ‘fragments and white dust’ of daily life. Answering Zeno’s puzzle – ‘how to lead the best life’ – in ‘The Colour of the Dead,’ we are told ‘this is the lesson:/forfeit the body that demands its rights // exile yourself from the lost multitude’, though Pollard is too complex a writer to ignore paradoxes. If ‘you want the real,’ as in ‘The Real World,’ find the truth of Stalingrad in the detail: ‘seek out/pine needles, any greenness, rats, bark,/insects, dogs now breathless, puddle slime,/maggots scooped from toilet rims/and then/o yes/each other.’ And again, in a Note to ‘1543,’ Hans Holbein – ‘He who, with care, saved the appearances’ – left us his ‘observations without attempting to suggest a physical explanation for them’. Yet always, Pollard is aware that poets work in the most complex and vulnerable of all creative genres, languages which can be lost. This is beautifully expressed in ‘Eyak,’ an elegy for Mary Smith Jones, the last speaker of a language once spoken around the Copper River Delta in Alaska:

For you have taken with you
the subtle system of its sources
in the blue copper ice and waters
round the canoeing whaling salmon
mouth of Copper River
and the sandpiper’s crying in another language
as yours
falling over the icescape
of the mind.

Music is the dominant metaphor in the second part. In ‘The Dark Fiddler,’ Delius returns to Florida to find the child he had fathered with a black slave. ‘Back again/into the ever glad and dancing/sun’s dark love among the oranges,’ he fails to find his daughter, and his ‘little sad mulatto of recall’ is transformed into the ‘too rich harmonies of horn/bassoon, flute, strings,/their chordal lush/backing away/into the orchestration of my life’s/chromatics’. ‘Rodrigo at the Keyboard’ has the blind composer finding the ‘polyphony/he knew and simply,/quietly,/in the distance of its loneliness,/drew forth’ through his fingertips, ‘tender as creation,’ roaming ‘along the curves and dips’ of the keyboard. In the eponymous ‘Britten,’ the composer was never influenced by the 12-tone revolution but chose to walk ‘at my own pace,’ in ‘Bach ‘Cello Suite No 6’ describing the Prelude as ‘the tightening wind/blown into tears and loss’, the Courante ‘Rising on wingbeats/of the autumn leaf’, the Gavotte ‘a looping, low and swallow’s flight’ and the Gigue as ‘the skin’s ghosts/that come and go/among the nerves’ bare winter/branches of the tongue’. At the end of this part, the eponymous ‘Final notes’ are indeed ‘the art of final things,’ captured superbly in a handful of poems.
Part three consists of twelve ‘Odes’ using Keats’s rhymed, ten-line iambic pentameter stanza form, each ‘Ode’ being a single stanza. The imagery and metaphors remain as powerful as ever: ‘Thus the wood blows its candles as it blanches’ in ‘Ode 1’; ‘Honey can poison for its colour’s sake’ in ‘Ode 2’; ‘There are still ghosts invisible in waters/cradled under a cobbled ancient moon’ in ‘Ode 3’; ‘High on the bell tower sudden sparks of fire’ send ‘cold vibrations echoing // to us as crows of circling thunder’ in ‘Ode 6.’ Two Odes in particular seem to predict a future Nietzsche predicted. From ‘Ode 4’:

stone only stone and angels soulless gazing
at Pluto’s spinning, ever circling moons
and ever black beyonds among the points
of silent stars between dark matter blazing.

And in ‘Ode 9’, speaking directly to Keats: ‘The power you laid to rest yet hardly knew it/was the withdrawing language that you heard.’ I’m not entirely convinced that the homage to the Keatsian stanza adds anything to what is being said, but the language sustains Pollard’s themes.
In the fourth part, the memories – if that is what these poems are – are more personal. ‘Canticles for Ana’ – ‘a poem about fatherhood’ – tells us ‘Fatherhood is a strange nakedness // a bird caressed in cupped hands/with the offer of flight.’ Here, ‘Words lose their meanings/between I and she’, and ‘can I call it a love’ this ‘slow loss that fatherhood entails?’ Interestingly, the best poems in this part return to Keats, perhaps obsessed with death. In ‘Autumn’, the ‘half expected touch of rain on cheek/from the threat of endings/and no new days’; in ‘Melancholy,’ our ‘sudden soul’s approaching/twilight fills our ears with the small sounds/and our eyes with drowning’; and perhaps most powerfully ‘Your song is haunted by impossibilities’ in ‘Notes for a Nightingale,’ and ‘death of song’ in ‘To a Caged Nightingale.’
In the final fifth part, the last line of ‘Ayesha,’ the Vulgate’s ‘vox clamantis in deserto – ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness’ – takes us to Plato and Aquinas, Oedipus and Cain, Byzantium and Classical Greece, Christianity and Gods much older than Christianity. But in all of this, the poet reminds us in ‘Ayesha,’ ‘Words are the only curse we have’ with our ‘venerable language/that has lost the intonations to decipher them’. As Broken Voices has reminded us, and specifically in ‘Expository,’ ‘there is nothing intellectual/which has not cried out to us first/in sight and taste,/in the five senses of our covering skin

William Bedford,