Poetry Proper 3rd Issue

8/4/2019 Poetry Proper 3rd Issue

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POETRY PROPERIssue 3


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POETRY PROPER

Page

A Prologue 3-4

Poems by

Martin Mooney 5-7

Christopher Kitson 9-10

Elizabeth Campbell 12-14

Eoghan Walls 16-17

Dominic Connell 18-19

Richard Epstein 21-22

Nell Regan 23

Vidyan Ravinthiran 24

Featured Poet: Frances Leviston

Poems 26-28

Essay: Fabulous Appendages: Ange Mlinko's

Shoulder Season

30-43

Photographs

Paul Maddern, from An Hour in Tate Modern


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PrologueWritten by a Person of Quality

In vain we labour to reform the Stage,Poets have caught too the Disease o' th' Age,

That Pest, of not being quiet when they're well,That restless Fever, in the Brethren, Zeal;In publick Spirits call'd, Good o'th' Commonweal.Some for this Faction cry, others for that,The pious Mobile for they know not what:So tho by different ways the Fever seize,In all 'tis one and the same mad Disease.Our Author tool as all new Zealots do,Full of Conceit and Contradiction too,'Cause the first Project took, is now so vain,T' attempt to play the old Game o'er again:The Scene is only chang'd; for who wou'd layA Plot, so hopeful, just the same dull way?Poets, like Statesmen, with a little change,Pass off old Politicks for new and strange;Tho the few Men of Sense decry't aloud,The Cheat will pass with the unthinking Croud:

The Rabble 'tis we court, those powerful things,Whose Voices can impose even Laws on Kings.A Pox of Sense and Reason, or dull Rules,Give us an Audience that declares for Fools;Our Play will stand fair: we've Monsters too,Which far exceed your City Pope for Show.

Almighty Rabble, 'tis to you this DayOur humble Author dedicates the Play,From those who in our lofty Tire sit,Down to the dull Stage-Cullies of the Pit,Who have much Money, and but little Wit:Whose useful Purses, and whose empty SkullsTo private Int'rest make ye Publick Tools;To work on Projects which the wiser frame,And of fine Men of Business get the Name.You who have left caballing here of late,

Imploy'd in matters of a mightier weight;


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To you we make our humble Application,You'd spare some time from your dear new Vocation,Of drinking deep, then settling the Nation,To countenance us, whom Commonwealths of oldDid the most politick Diversion hold.

Plays were so useful thought to Government,That Laws were made for their Establishment;Howe'er in Schools differing Opinions jar,Yet all agree i' th' crouded Theatre,Which none forsook in any Change or War.That, like their Gods, unviolated stood,Equally needful to the publick Good.Throw then, Great Sirs, some vacant hours away,

And your Petitioners shall humbly pray, &c.

Aphra BehnfromThe Rover, or, The Banishd Cavaliers


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Bernard Manning in Hell

Bernard Manning has discovered hellsanother round of sentry-go at Spandau.Dressed in Bermudas and Hawaiian shirt,

he shares a NAAFI brew with Speer:

So, two yids escape from DachauWhen his wife died, he moved back with his Mam.Youjust simmered in your widowers flatlooking out for Roma paper-boys until

your stroke. Now theres someones leg

in bed beside you, sometimes a personlying to your left who keeps so stillyou think theyre hiding from authority.

Manning scans the brimstone for a newarrival: look, a coon. He tells the oneabout the Klansmen angling for gator.You are so careful not to offend you warn

the nurses if a joke will have bad language,but then you tell it anyway, and makethe grimace odd part-wink, part sneer thats all the smile youre left with.

Martin Mooney


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Aubade

The forty-four year old in the shower what has he got to sing about?His children. His lover. His work.

Doesnt he know he has already lived more than half his life?

Hes singing about that too.A regiment of deaths is assembling in his cells.

Not singing wont disperse them.Hes lucky he remembers half the words of the song.

Yes, he is.In fact, he is making most of them up as he goes along.

A bag of sticks. A heap of stones.His children are putting their fingers in their ears.

Their ears are lovely.

And the girl waking in the next room what does she see in him?He hasnt a clue de-doo de-doo.

Martin Mooney


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ONeill Road

You need your wits about you,coming off the roundabout

at Carnmoney cemeterya difficult lane-change and,

in winter, the dazzleof your own lights reflected

in the frosty headstonesof the sculptors yard

like an oncoming vehicleon the wrong side of the road.

Martin Mooney


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The AmbassadorsHans Holbein (1533)

Sense the tensions in the curtains;Observe the twitches, shifts and furtive

Murmurs fanning through the bristledErmine and the worming silk. FeelThe thickness of the fingers as theyHang or fidget, physical asIngots, blunt and weighed. Now blink:Notice eyelids flutter overGlobes rotating in their sockets,Each a fraction out of kilter;Look at how the nerves are shot.Switch, then, to the fulcrum of theEntire scene, to the painterInterfering in the fabric,Scuffling at the oil and oakwood,Harsh as on a night-time doorway.Examine, most of all, the inches,Radians and seconds over on theEquinoctal dials, how they almost seem to speak.

Christopher Kitson


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On the Flightpaths of Bats

I tell my friends to walk the coastal path at dusk:The bats swoop past your head. Its great!Why they do it? Well.... I confess, I just repeat

some tale: They catch the microscopic gnats aroundyour skin . Fanciful enough, Im sure,but, lack of evidence aside,Im attracted by this unseen-cloud idea,of us in empty, weighty human-space:

it could, as well, be why they dont touch you(as you cant them, by law). Theyre visible

just on the turn, like sheen in velvetor the chasing shale of sea-top breeze.The gulls and hoodie-crows belowtack and soar, navigating wind,but bats inhabit thinner places, drawtheir courses on poetic, shivering, charts.

Christopher Kitson


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Dalkey Island for Maria, David and Aingeal

Terns demonstrate the work of flightby stopping in the sky dropping

like flintheads to pierce the channel after prey:

turning the air-and-water beyond this cliffwith sudden decisions,sheering off, thinking better, the way reasons

glance in our minds like flicks of sunny fish,though mostly they miss worryingup again, riding another angle, until your reason

reasons suddenly: these powerful dives are powerednot by birds, but their agreementwith passive gravity.

Perhaps all your insights are this obvious modest freefalls out of doubtwhen the mind stops beating and the head bows

out of the abstraction of the air, to whack fishlike nodding into sleep, terns plummetingsilently into the surface of giant seas.

Elizabeth Campbell


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Givingfor Emily

Chips to the gulls: best part of the meal,becoming prince, distributing or withholding

munificence, largesse, consolingthe lame and the ugly, punishing

the upstart and the bully here am I! Centrifugalat the core of my giving:Adam's next move after namingthe creatures was feeding them.

And that crazy old lady, filthy

with pigeons in the square, whorl at the centreof her own magnanimity, is this princely humanfor, despite anomalies

of suckling, grooming and studies which showmost monkeys choose the leverdispensing fruit to their neighbour too, givingis what animals mostly don't do.

Still, children are mad for fauna, from each exemplarof the AaBbCc, throughto the naughty beast of the parable.And holding hands to feed the ducks, we teach the child to give.

Hours I spent, awayfrom the others, tearing armfuls of sweetspring grass for someone's horse that strained

at the fence, then got bored before I did, staring off, accepting

kisses with the food. I'd keep it up,herculean, all afternoon, provingsomething, as when we stayed late in the pool,shaking and blue, on principle (getting it wrong? it wasn't

pleasure, but was itfreedom?) and scorning sadadult moderation, we becamedancers, binge-drinkers there was a thought in this of giving.


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Stale loaves for the gulls, torn breadlooping up as grappling hook, caught at the rampart beak.Reeling them closer, you teach themto take it from your hand, eyes on the bread, mind on you.

Emily, at the park at two-and-a-half: too young yetto enjoy reflexive pleasures of the gift, sheknows more easily what happiness is: stares,says 'duck duck' but prefers stale as it is,

it is still good herself to eat the bread.

Elizabeth Campbell


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The Dance of Araratafter W C Williams

If my wife is snoring as softly as a musk-ox,the child purring in the cot, and a distant hum

declares the taxis and rain have nearly stopped

and my empties are strewn like a planetariumin the aquatic light of my screensaver, as I riseand feel the deck shift under the living room

but catch myself in an arabesque, and the lineof muscle in my forearm seems a thing of gloryand behold, my hard calves, buttocks and thighs

and sense the thousands in the darkness, more,a disco of silent limbs around me and each oneheaving their breaths, ecstatic, owning the floor

then who is to say I am less than Noah, captainwaiting for the tide to breach against the topof Ararat, one hand steady on the klaxon?

Eoghan Walls


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Revenge of the Crabmonstersafter Lawrence Raab; for Colm and Fiona

1.Crabmeat sizzles upon a pockmarked platter,

and your tits look cracking. I drain your glass,light cracking the molecules of the water,and chuck a discreet fiver to the waiter

just as you tumble heavily on your ass.

2.Like crabmeat sizzling under its pockmarked platter,spongy flesh ran through you. One of the cancers.

You took each drink they gave you, and did not askwhat light had cracked the molecules in the water.

3.You poke for new growth where the skin is tender.I hear your brain even when your face is downcastlike crabmeat sizzling under a pockmarked platter.

One day you'll get a bruise and there'll be laughterinstead of this slow probing of your crevasse.

4.Lightning cracks the molecules through the water.I scan the waves for the shadow of giant pincers,straining my ears as I get smashed on our terrace,for crabmeat sizzling under pockmarked platters,

or a light crackle of molecules beneath the water.

Eoghan Walls


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Timesharers

They bask in washed-up summer,hosting supper from their perches.Raising toasts. Draining every drop.

By day they loll, ignoring any rep.They say they bring enough of their own custom.There is a raft of thingsthey drift on in their small talk.In the small print. Given thingsbetween them, told in tongues,hidden among the Ts and Cs.They flock to beachfront balconiesimmersed in saga, watching suns give out,

and write their crabbed dispatchesfrom the concrete edge of ever-after.

Dominic Connell


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Petes Granddad

is a time machine gone wrong,reduced to furniture.He is an empty box,

an echo chamber, blank and muteuntil some bell is rung.And though a ghost in his own house,a stale long-standing jokeplayed on himself, sometimeshis seized machinery still chimes.He is sporadic, striking upa long-forgotten tunewhen it is least expected.

He has amassed small reckoningsto ward off shifting sands,reverts when moved to simple repetition,catechising childrens birthdays,planets names, Richard of York.He recollects that stalactites come down.His family is lost when he starts speaking

to some long gone friend.They look, despite themselves,at empty space, at his sun-spotted handsthat point and sweep two places at once.

Dominic Connell


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Winter Leaves

Look, have I mentioned how the winter leavesResemble bronze? That statue of a tree,It is a tree. The art of standing still,

Of keeping still till everyone forgetsThe name you had when swords were haute couture,When bronze was for an age, and dryads sleptWith bark for blankets, that you still possess.Have I not watered you when it was dryAnd promised that the birds would love you, too?Some day a god will build his nest from hairHe took as trophy. Some day he will kissConfusion into legs and roots, some day;

And men will cut themselves on winter leavesAnd swear eternal love, day after day.

Richard Epstein


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This House No Longer

This is a house without chalcedonyOr Andamooka opals, and it deemsIts seizure insecure. Hawks veer away

To overfly somebody else's house.It brooks no flower beds. It dries no bones.This house is what it is, is what it is.

You want to meet us? We share a single bath,Not privacy. Our calendar misquotesIn scarlet letters, Make your life sublimeUse Rapid Sands. We never leave the roomFor grave emergencies. Our motto is

A tramp stamp on the lady of the house,Her fine embroidered sacroiliac,Hunker Down, which seems not to overstate,

And understatement is a way of life.Why, there is a bone here after all: a moleHas left his skull, a warrior's helmet toy,For Spike to crunch and play with. This is a house

Without a porphyry tub or sisal stringsTo anchor it, and someday it will leave.

Richard Epstein


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On Sunday night at 8pm the batteries on Fort Camden and Carlisle opened fire on a suspiciousobject in the water believed to have been a German submarine. During the firing two of the shells

from the batteries ricocheted off the water passing to the mainland of Crosshaven. One shellburst but the other did not. No harm was done by the shells landing on the mainland andnothing has transpired as to the effect of the engagement with the supposed unwelcome visitor tothe harbour.

Southern Star, January 1915

Squealing and keening it entered the sea,seeking each breach of defence,echoing beyond its reach

how my soughing and spouting set it offis not known. Ploughing throughthe sound I thought I was bound for home

but when the sky darkened at fourI knew I had come too farout of my glutinous, smooth waters.

It wheeled past me and air itself

splintered; the sea it cracked from side to side.then bubbled and churned pig iron

so hearing smelted and fell in greathissing drops to the sea floor. Songstood still. Listening was lifted

on the swell and sucked back

into its vacuum. It set off a wavethat gathered oceans to itself and collapsed as sound.

Nell Regan


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Snow

What Im saying is, this isnt the right kind of snow.Sure the anchors call it treacherousbut Ive met it down dark alleys all my life.

No, snow should always be, as kids have it, a miracleof whiteness at the pane, flakes large enoughto plink at the glass like a moth or a fingernailand dry out slow enough to watch drying outon the clothing of the one you love. Forgetthe ice-box favoured in the emergency room,its snow like this a heart comes bedded in.And forget those now-useless runways;planes in mid-air grow sensitive,

the riveted metal of their wings goose pimplesas they go swooping through two kinds of white.The difference between snow and water isthe difference between dialectic and a kiss,between a birth certificate and spare change.This much you already know. What you dont knowis snow, is slanted crystals the halo rounda sodium lamp cant bear without shuddering.

The tale about the Eskimos hundred words for itmay be apocryphal, but the epicanthic foldis real, and may well, within our lifetimes,boss the globe while credit shifts and meltsand hardens and is lost, as the great man says,like water in water. Even his words are merelyso many thought-bubbles made visibleas we breathe in a snowy climate:white shapes of breath that want, like the smoke

from a cigarette, or the super-slow-mo ripplesof a cube of gelatine bounced off tile, to bethe drapes and folds of statuary. The bareruined choir, the coloured glass is stainedto a white radiance and goeswithout remainder into water, a new beginning;yet the snow we make play weapons of and buildinto forts well live in, when all grown up

wants to change, always, into a white beard.

Vidyan Ravinthiran


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Featured Poet: Frances Leviston3 Poems

Formations

Rosy conical fingers of rockerupt from the canyon floors they overshadow,if eruption can be slow,and indicate in perpetuity the bluebattlements of heaven and twelve o'clock.

Sagebrushes up in arms they dismiss

with a calm peaceful gesture,though not exactly pacifists, and army compoundsparachuted down within toppling distanceremain by their good grace,each uniform suffering a puff of pink dust.

Ambitious climbers, who clingto those planes by their sandpapered fingertips,or brace cracked verticalslike winter toads inching up cavity walls,plan on savouring the summit. They're wrong

dainty for picking sweetmeats off the horizon,it's as hard to pause on those pinnaclesas to stand on pivots.Vultures learn vertigo there. Like footless martletsthey fall in familiar down-drafted spirals

to land on a carrion beacon.


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Bearded Ladies

1.At the library there worked a woman whose trembly underchin bore a nimbusof long grey hairs like the guard-hairs on a rabbit. Much as I deplorestereotypes they often take root in fact. With such hypersensitivities she lived,

a creature of the moving air, intermediary of atmosphere and dust, finderof stuff believed to be lost; and every five oclock she completely disappeared.

2.The 15th century Nuremberg Chronicles contains an illustration of a hirsute woman.She sits naked on the ground, her legs outstretched, and her armsseem to conjure a tall plant from the earth. Her body is cloaked in curls of hairrepeating the curls of the leaves on the plant. A shocked ruff runs the length

of her spine, fanned flames, a dragons crest. Her left breast is visible, also on fire.

3.This flyer from the old American Museum shows Madame Clofullia, circa 1856,neatly trimmed in Napoleonic style, cinched at the waist, a graven locketswinging from a long silver chain about her navel, and she herself the portrait in it,a panel framed by wreaths of roses, cameo or coronation-plate, afloatbetween the columns and balustrades of Barnums most profitable fairytale castle.

4.Encountering a very tall woman in the womens toilets I cannot help but wonderif the big hands that softly soap themselves under lavender UV lightbelong in the day to someone else, and soon the words man and woman start to swimthrough each other the way two slippery hands in a basin swim and swapplaces under the immediacies of water, separated only by a hairsbreadth of shadow.


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Irisene

Shocking pink and plasticky-looking,something that could titivate an antechamber

or teach medics nerves,its leaves contuse around their perimeters.

When the sunset shines through it, it responds in kind,glowing until the horizon intervenesas if it doesn't belong on land.

Picture it undersea, thriving on saline,whining theremin-ethereal where the underwaves

wash through its rounded dividends, its tender branchesimpersonating anemone and coral,

parts forever colourfuland moist and scared: flinching clitoral architecture,the glans inside its hermit cowl.


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Featured Poet: Frances Leviston

Essay

Fabulous Appendages: Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season

Language comes so naturally to us that it is easy to forget what a strange

and miraculous gift it is, wrote Steven Pinker at the start of Words and

Rules (1999), a book presenting language as not only a tool for

communication but also a medium for wordplay and poetry and an

heirloom of endless fascination. So far, so inoffensive; but at least one

word in that opening gambit, miraculous, signals the controversy in

which such arguments often find themselves embroiled. Pinker's mosticonic book, The Language Instinct (1994), connected language acquisition to

evolutionary science, arguing that the capacity to communicate in words is

as genetically definitional of homo sapiens as the spider's capacity to spin a

web, and earning a laudatory jacket quotation from Richard Dawkins. Its

success was a huge disappointment for those who believe Adam really did

name all the animals himself. So why that word, miraculous? Although

used here in a secular capacity, simply to marvel at the power of speech, it

cannot be divorced from its religious connotations; the same could be said,

indeed, of gift, which begs the question, From whom? Pinker's choice

of phrasing is perhaps mischievous, or petty, but it is far from pointless

when creationism can still be taught in schools. How children learn to

speak how they raise themselves, in language, from the babbling of

babyhood is an ideologically loaded question.

Shoulder Season (Coffee House Press, 2010), the third collection from theAmerican poet Ange Mlinko, writes itself confidently into these debates.

Mlinko's first book, Matines (1999), demonstrated a jaunty awareness of

language-as-medium that earned her many comparisons to the New York

School. Her second, Starred Wire (2006), tackled modes of cultural

production and curation. Fascinating as these earlier books were, their

excessive verbal dexterity and propulsive, investigative force sometimes

lacked focus. Shoulder Season solves this by bringing language into the

foreground as the explicit subject of the poems, and, at the same time,reckoning with the challenge of parenting young children, so that the


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linguistic concerns of an adult poet are fused with the concerns of a new

mother and the radical economies of language-exchange with young

children. Paying particular attention to the poems Squill, This One and

That One and This is the Latest, I would like to discuss the perspective

Shoulder Season offers on competing models of language acquisition asMlinko discharges her poet's responsibility not just to demonstrate but also

to enlarge the miraculous gift of language.

Whilst working on Shoulder Season, Mlinko began to write a regular column

on language for The Nation. One piece from April 2010 contrasts a

neuroscientific volume on the cognitive impact of literacy (Reading in the

Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene) with a book about hunting for rare words

(Reading the OED, by Amman Shea), showcasing Mlinko's characteristic

impatience with utilitarian approaches to language: There are people, in

sum, who read weird things for pleasure. There are people who read,

period, for pleasure. This sense of reading as excess, as perversity, or sheer

epicureanism is left unaccounted for in Reading in the Brain. Books that

merely use language, like a whip or a spoon, or which fail to take into

consideration those readers who are motivated by the weird, obsolete or

eccentric among us, are of limited interest to Mlinko. It is the surprises in

Dehaene's book that really capture her imagination, like the news that the

three bones of our middle ear are left over, in evolutionary terms, from

reptilian jaws. Shoulder Season often mentions ears zeugmatically in order

to remark on the ability / to attend: a quotation from Tree in the Ear

regarding children's music lessons, although Mlinko is concerned not only

with the ability to attend school but to remain attentive long after

graduation. As the column is keen to emphasise, language acquisition is a

lifelong process:

You probably remember your early schooling in the alphabet

song, letters and numbers, and handwriting practice. The process

went on much longer than that: your neurons went on building a

mental lexicon, compiling statistics about the prosodic and

spelling patterns in your language, and coordinating the different

networks that recognize meaning and sound so that they could

work in close association. The granularity of this knowledge can'tbe summed up easily: any language consists of untold numbers of


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arbitrary, infinitesimal differences. It calls on one part of the brain

to, say, distinguish pair and pear, another to pair pair and couple,

and another to suppress the arbitrary difference between pear and

PEAR, or "pear" as it is printed here and its cursive version. And

that's just ambiguity at the level of the word.

These columns were written for a general audience, so in this case Mlinko

draws no parallels with literary language; but those of us who are

interested in her poetry, too, can see further implications. If meaning and

sound work in close relationship for everyone, how does that affect our

attitude towards poetry, which then seems to have no special claim on such

a close association, but rather to be surfacing a system that already

perfectly exists? Where does that system originate? Is Mlinko, or any poet,

really invested in what Pinker calls the principle of the arbitrary sign,

which would disbar any genuine sense of the miraculous? And how

does she square those rather cold and clinical arbitrary, infinitesimal

differences with the pleasurable, prodigal excesses of her sheer

epicureanism?

Taking arbitrary, infinitesimal differences as a starting point, the ability

to make hairline distinctions between sounds provides an aesthetic and

rhetorical device throughout Shoulder Season. This is at its most

conspicuously self-conscious in Squill, a poem about the broken nights of

parenthood, which begins, Half-asleep, I heard a pin drop. The line

seems to hang itself on a familiar figure of speech, until we remember that

the figure is normally you could have heard a pin drop: in Mlinko's

poem, that hyperbolic eventuality has come to pass. The pin returns after a

few lines, and more pressure is applied to the image:

At the far end of the hall, behind a door,

I heard a pin drop. In another room

on the unpolyurethaned wooden floor

where gaps were growing between slats

I could distinguish the sound from

that of a screw. I knew it from a thumbtack.

What was that dreamthe brain candy cottoned to, the flight


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from a battalion, a mane slipping my grip

as my ear divined a button's bakelite

from a Lego...

The mother is half-consciously trying to decide whether to be alarmed bythe noise she hears or not. Different objects are invoked and told apart

from one another a pin, a screw, a thumbtack, a bakelite button, a Lego

brick and the methods by which the narrator tells them apart are equally

various: she heard, distinguish[ed], knew, divined. In this

manner, the poem yokes the supercharged sensory experience of the

anxious parent to the linguistic facility of the poet, sliding from sound to

sound, apprehension to apprehension, picking them apart with

hallucinatory precision. It is not coincidental that the poem rhymes: the

half-twists and consonant-shifts of the rhyme-words reproduce in us the

same absolute alertness to tiny distinctions between sounds that the

speaker is experiencing as she listens to the pin and then its successors

drop. This is something Mlinko may have learned, in part, from Muldoon;

certainly the use of a small noise to unleash a huge amount of imaginative

work finds several precedents with him, noticeably in Horse Latitudes

(2006), as Tithonus ties the day-old cheep of a smoke detector on the

blink to the two-thousand-year-old chirrup / of a grasshopper by way

of an improbable family history; or It Is What It Is, where the playthings

of a child like the Lego in Squill launch a parent's flight of fancy.

Shoulder Season is saturated with parental anxiety, and as a result the

poems display an almost hyperactive awareness that sees, hears and feels

intimations of danger at every turn. The cheap ubiquity of high-speed

travel, for instance, gives rise to poems like Penny Squasher, whichshows vulnerable children in the back seat of a car whooshed through the

nickelodeon lights // of the turnpike. The violence of the old-fashioned

penny squasher (or penny smasher) of the title, a machine which would

elongate pennies and emboss them with new designs as souvenirs, is

conjured up by the speaker in response to a rather innocent anamorphic

octagon of light thrown across the wall at a service station. The poem

ends, with relief, Boys asleep, unharmed, in car seat, in carrycot. In

Thalassotherapy, Mlinko combines nonsense refrains with what wouldappear to be a radical updating of Larkin's The Explosion, the result of


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which is entirely her own a strange and moving piece that navigates

nimbly between childlike delight in word-play (it begins Envying binges

/ of unbandaged waves) and the urgency of protecting the fragile brain-

matter that makes such enjoyment possible. The poem ends, The life

jackets made / of the same foam / as the bicycle helmet / que'est-ce quec'est cracked in two / in your hands. / What remains of the butter-and-

eggs.

This specific anxiety dovetails with the book's more general apprehension

of a world dangerously in thrall to the idea of danger. We read of a human

being designated the single point of failure / in a system that generates

160 million / thanks to his proprietary algorithms the algorithm being,

in a sense, the grammar of computing. In a society obsessed with

information security, even domestic chores become occasions for paranoia:

Someone's taking the recycling out with frozen hands / when the difficult

wind chooses then / to explode its data all over the streets of Peekskill.

Post-crunch, bonds and securities are relentlessly ironised, securing

nobody but the provider, as Someone uses your mortgage / to leverage /

something / far inside the starbursts of a server. A woman sits up

sleepless, cocked like a gun in her own bed, as Earth looms like a rock /

outside the window threatening fissure / from a petaled 9M133 Kornet.

But this feeling of powerlessness in the face of systems and forces so much

larger and more inevitable than the individual will also makes for

exhilarating poetry, as Mlinko and her reader surrender to the

unfathomable complexity, intelligence and redundancy of a language

evolving at high speed to keep pace with the world it has to describe. In

evolutionary terms, our sense-skills are always ahead of our language-

skills. Poetry Mlinko's poetry, at least simply tries harder to keep up.Does the feeling of gorgeous inevitability in Mlinko's work come from its

acquiescence to the sublimated patterns of English, or from an active

engagement with, and manipulation of, those patterns? This is false

dichotomy, we learn: her poems show that intelligent language never

simply speaks through us, but demands the application of intelligence in

return, in a mutually-invigorating loop.

This loop reflects Mlinko's more prosodic views on language, particularlyher attitude towards the theories of acquisition proposed by Pinker. In an


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interview with Jordan Davis for Molossus in 2010, she said, I am such a

hopeless Byzantine that I almost believe, contra Steven Pinker, that

language structures genetically shape the brain. You see the epicanthal

folds in my Americanized family, so why not in our language? Epicanthal

folds are the heavy eyelids obscuring the inner corner of the eye in peoplesof Asiatic descent, including those from the Urals. Mlinko's family came to

the United States from Hungary, and here she makes a comparison

between their persistently Uralic facial features and the imagined

persistence of Uralic predispositions in their speech. Although she presents

this position as contra Pinker, insofar as it suggests that the brain's

genetic make-up is modified by developments in language, rather than

simply producing the language instinct itself, she only almost believes

it, leaving us with a residual sense of sympathy for Pinker's work.

Nevertheless, it is a mark of her investment in this issue that she cannot

simply repeat Pinker's argument, but must add nuances of her own. It is at

a similarly qualified idea that Squill eventually arrives, first picturing the

squill of the title, the smallest simplest flower in the cold, growing inside

the mirroring labyrinths of the speaker's ears where it acts as a sensory

organ, and then suggesting that the squill may be both receiver and

transmitter: First flower of the year, Easterish / and yet it could be a bold

/ spy device, an earpiece. Is there something, she asks, embedded in my

ear, like that lost reptilian jaw, suggesting certain strategies to me? The

poem concludes with a passage that presents the idea of a genetic

predisposition to Uralic formulations in the same wishful, uncertain way

Mlinko uses in interview, with an added sense of exile:

And though you say it is right

than no one descended from Uraliclanguage speakers

has Uralic

language structures

pre-determining the cast of thought until

badly retrofitted in English,

I could not see this Siberian squill,

this earpiece, Easterish,

and not think of the cells of a languagein my sleep, growing out of the frost,


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assembled from history, a burned bridge,

as the first division, from which I was lost.

The idea of a foreign object embedded in the ear, and its connection both to

language and to divine or genetic dictation, inevitably calls to mind Rilke'sfamous hoher Baum in Ohr. As we may remember, Mlinko herself makes

this reference explicit with the title of Tree in the Ear, and the poem's

memory of a park Where I had strolled with my son /for the first three

years of his life, / but which he no longer remembered, / for that cherub

no longer existed. / O hoher Baum in Ohr! Mlinko's review of Edward

Snow's new collected translations of Rilke (2009) opens with a discussion of

Caedmon's hymn, written by Caedmon in the 7 th century after a dream in

which an angel commanded him to Sing the beginning of the animals!, as

divine dictation; Rilke tackles the same story in his Sonnets to Orpheus, and

Mlinko uses the two poets' approaches as staging-posts in poetry's journey

from inspiration to orphic radio, of which her own earpiece image is

an example.

As if to further examine how that first division, and the cherub her son

used to be, are lost, Squill is followed and faced in Shoulder Season by a

poem called This One and That One, which anatomises the language-

relationship between mother and child at three different stages of

development. The deictic title draws attention to how we indicate different

objects and their closeness to our own sphere of influence: this is close to

me; that is further away. The poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis has written,

Deixis in linguistics is a particular category of words: the shifters,

precisely those that change in reference given the position in time and

space of the speaker. They are words that can only be fully understood asparticular statement about particular contexts; they point into this

situation, Now (Jacket, 2008). Deictic words are intrinsic to language

acquisition as a stand-in for missing nouns: children soon learn to ask

What's that? as a way of requesting names for what they see, or to tell

people what this is as a way of confirming their knowledge. Deixis also

enacts the separation of the child from the mother, as the child must

account for the this of itself being different to the that of its mother's

body. Mlinko constructs her poem in three brief numbered sections. Here isthe first:


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She swears she saw, in this one's crib last night, that phosphorescence

that portends horns of a kind, fabulous appendages

when he proceeded to speak in ancestral gibberish.

The poem is playing with tropes of prodigality. One the one hand, the child

in the crib, or manger, overhung by a shining light that announces his birth

and/or has a kind of halo-presence, puts us in mind of Christ; on the other

hand, the horns make us think of the devil incarnate. The ancestral

gibberish recalls speaking in tongues, which comes either from possession

by the Holy Spirit or possession by a demon. Moses was often depicted

with horns in medieval and Renaissance art, a trend widely but not

exclusively attributed to the Vulgate's mistranslation of the Hebrew qeren

as horns instead of rays of light in the Exodus description of Moses

descending from Mount Sinai after his communion with God (see

Mellinkoff's The Horned Moses, 1970). Famously, the baby Moses was also

floated downstream in a rush-basket, a rudimentary crib, to be adopted by

the Egyptian royal family because his mother feared for his life. Mlinko

invokes both the horns and the rays of light (as phosphorescence) to

suggest the onset of the word: the onset of language.

Those fabulous appendages are words, and everything words bring. To

append means to attach something after the fact; it is a word associated

with words, with writing. Language's arrival lags behind the arrival of the

child. At the same time, appendages are physiological limbs, fingers,

and so on which returns us to a biological origin for speech, and to the

idea of speech resulting in biological changes to the body, in this case thehorns Moses acquires. The fabulous nature of these linguistic

appendages is another manifestation of the lingering sense of the

miraculousness of language that Pinker was unable to resist.

Prodigal gives rise to prodigy and prodigious, all but divorced from

their biblical root, now, and taken to mean someone who demonstrates, at

a young age, exceptional facilities or talents, or to describe the production

of exceptional amounts of work. In this sense, we can see prodigallinking back to those ideas of excellence and excess that Mlinko was so


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keen to foreground in The Nation. Her preceding column, in March 2010,

offered The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary as an

occasion for thinking about the difference between superfluity and bounty.

What a prodigy gives us is bountiful; anyone else's virtuosity or over-

production is simply superfluous. This is a huge challenge for any poet,vulnerable as they are to accusations of frivolity or uselessness. Some try to

hide this with a semblance of utility; others, like Mlinko, make an open

secret of it, and a virtue of their own virtuosity. As she said in the Davis

interview, I love shows of brilliance and virtuosity. I dont share the

American prejudice for modesty in poems, but I do believe in a sense of

proportion and elegance, things which give meaning to the idea of

virtuosity, I guess.

Mlinko's word-play in This One and That One is one example of how to

give meaning to the idea of virtuosity. A crib is not just a child's cot, it is

also a literal translation, or a handy guide to something much more

complex than itself. The language of children, and the language mothers

use with their children, can be seen as a crib rather than a text; and

language is a crib for experience, a way of making it more easily

understood. If we look at the sound-patterning here, we can how see the

ib of crib is picked up by gibberish, and the p and end of

portends and the soft g of gibberish by appendages. We can hear

phosphorescence recur in ancestral. These patterns give the lines a

feeling of inevitability, of portentousness, as we hear a sound occur and

recur; but each recurrence is a reformulation, undermining the familiarity

even as it appears. Likewise the sophistication of the patterning is

undermined by words like gibberish, which alert us to the many

nonsensical aspects of poetry, and to language's origin in the gibbering ofsimian antecedents.

This prodigious, paranomasiac virtuosity is openly admitted to the

argument of the poem in the second section, where we learn how that

one, an older child, has discovered the joys of rhyming things that click:

he plays with words, and make nonsensical connections based on sound

and satisfaction alone, an obvious parallel to the satisfaction taken by a

poet. The nebulous she has now become his mother, and with thisseparation her anxiety has grown from a wondrous fear of the supernatural


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into a rational fear of her son's potential to damage himself or others, as the

uncontrollable rhyming makes her dream of switches on safetys

simultaneously flipped. Finally, in the third section, the mother's attention

turns to her own speech:

She swears she hears, in her own mamanaise, thoniers on a fishing-boat

haul in seine nets full of langoustines; cats enceinte in hyacinth;

tongues evolved to cleanse them of the telltale smell of meat,

the smell of meat on cubs, telltale bas-cuisine.

Mamanaise is the simplified language adults use with babies. Thonier

means tuna-fisherman. A seine net is a long, flat fishing net used to

enclose schools of fish, like a fence. The noun enceinte refers to the

enclosed inner wall of a fortification; the adjective means pregnant. Bas-

cuisine is cheap local food, or cheap, tough cuts of meat. Those tongues

evolved, then, are literally the rough tongues of cats, but we also use

tongue as a synonym for language, as in mother tongue, or a synonym

for babble, as in speaking in tongues. Mlinko is reasserting the idea of a

buried or nascent linguistic tradition, not Uralic this time, but French: for

English speakers, a smattering of French is a sign of linguistic prestige.

There is a deictic pun lurking behind all this: who's she, the cat's mother?,

we say, when telling children off for a disrespectful address (there is also, I

think, a joke about tuna mayonnaise). In this case, the speaker is positively

identifying herself with a cat's mother, cleaning her offspring of the

telltale smell of meat their primal, speechless animalism with her

own developed tongue. In the final line, this comparison slips gears into

social commentary, reminding us that language can be developed not onlyto communicate one's origins but to conceal them. The repeated telltale,

here meaning giveaway, but derived from telling a tale, alerts us to the

ways in which language allows us to tell tales about ourselves, including

biblical tales, which conceal how we too were once l-bas: as Mlinko puts it,

again using French to signal her own distance from infantile speech, O

because one is never l-bas for long, / holding an infant is like going to

Paris (Rocamadour).


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Mlinko's attention to the connective deictic ligaments of language also puts

us in mind of Muldoon, This One and That One riffing off Muldoonian

titles like the aforementioned It Is What It Is; and we notice, too, in those

seine nets full of langoustines a version of Muldoon's a fishing boat /

complete with languorous net from Paul Klee: They're Biting, a poemwhich also contains goitred, / spiny fish-caricatures, and reassures us,

At any moment all this should connect. Connection definitively occurs

in the subsequent poem from Meeting the British (1987), the well-known

Something Else, in which the sight of a lobster being lifted from a tank

activates a long chain of associations, from how Nerval / was given to

promenade / a lobster on a gossamer thread to Nerval's eventual suicide,

as the poem concludes:

he hanged himself from a lamp-post

with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.

The final poem of Mlinko's that I would like to consider here, This is the

Latest, extends this double-jointed use of the crustacean as a vehicle for

exploring the connections between words; and it is in this poem that the

loaded tensions between evolution and creation that bubble away under

the book are brought most clearly to the surface.

This is the Latest takes place on Christmas Eve. In the first section, the

speaker settles a sacrificial lobster in the bath tub, where it will remain

until it is time for it to be cooked. The poem is again divided into three

sections, each spaced into two columns on the page, and this vertical andhorizontal segmentation mimics the segmentation of the lobster's shell,

which is itself identified with other joints and plates in the poem:

Wrapping an oversized box (coffee maker)

can't find a swathe of paper

big enough Start to cobble bits together

with tape (ah chitinous)


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Chitin is the primary material from which the exoskeletons of arthropods

are formed. The attention paid to the structure of the exoskeleton

(segmented, chitinous, with a gooseflesh appearance) and its mirroring

in the structure of the poem reminds us again of the Uralic language

structures that Mlinko considers in Squill, the skeleton of a language, ifyou like, which is innate to speakers of Uralic descent, moving outwards

from within. The lobster appeals as an image because of this inverted

relationship; and it appeals because its structure is so clearly visible, so

publicly apparent. Its tail, its claws, its feelers, are all fabulous

appendages. In Mlinko's imagination, this kind of visible and segmented

structure is linked not only to language but to language acquisition, as the

depiction of kindergarten's disjointed tidbits (Pandas eat bamboo.

Koalas eat eucalyptus) against the backdrop of a bamboo screen's living,

jointed segments in For All the World makes clear. Increased

sophistication means the increased ability to conjoin disjointed facts: to

make the words link up. Muldoon himself, an incorrigible joiner-upper,

one often given to nomenclative readings, might well make something of

Mlinko's name containing the words link as in connection, as in joint,

as in the missing link and ange (Fr.) or angel, too. Indeed, Mlinko

might do the same: when asked to free-associate on language by Jordan

Davis, she replied, It has angle and gauge in it, which are instruments for

measuring; it has gag in it for fun; it has egg in it for possibility; angel

which means messenger and Ange, for talisman.

Wrapping a gift for Christmas brings us full circle back to Pinker's

miraculous gift of language: the coffee maker wrapped in paper, the

lobster wrapped in chitin, the gifts brought to Christ, and the gift of Christ

himself. To make this explicit, This is the Latest navigates from thebathroom to the kitchen, where the lobster's final destination, an

extravagant fish soup, is being prepared:

...the broth of something Provenal

sings from the pot a little tomatoey

a little stigma (not stamen) of Crocus Sativusunder the Star of Bethlehem


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Sensitised as we are to Mlinko's linking of language and cuisine, her

appetite for sheer epicureanism, and the foodie words and concepts that

populate not only poems that obviously treat language acquisition (the bas-

cuisine of This One and That One) but other poems whose delight inwords is matched by their delight in eating Gourmandizing, about a

fancy organic restaurant, or Gallimaufry, about cooking for friends we

understand that this bouillabaisse is a way of exploring speech, and in

particular a way of drawing together the competing attitudes towards

language on display throughout the book. What we might not be prepared

for, however, is the cosmic scale of the treatment: after two sections of cosy

domesticity, the poem suddenly zooms out into space:

If the universe is this is the latest

bouncing between inflation

and shrinkage as if on a trillion-year

pendulum why wouldn't

an infant's sobbing on the exhale

have a prosody as on the inhale

it has the chemistry of tears and seas

or our bouillabaisse, indeed,

a primal soup contain besides babbling

and nonspeech and raspberries

in the briny speech stream a scuttling underwriter?

On a literal level, that scuttling underwriter is the lobster, its carapace

clicking against the pan, its body giving body to the soup and providinga foundational flavour upon which subtler notes can be built.

Metaphorically, however, the scuttling underwriter, underwriting the

poem as it does on its own line, returns us once again to the tantalising idea

that there may be some kind of definite origin for the primal soup of

speech. The fact that the poem takes place on Christmas Eve raises the

possibility that this origin may be divine as much as ancestral, even as that

image of the lobster scuttling along the base of the pan puts us in mind

of aquatic origins, and of the primordial soup theory proposed by J. B. S.Haldane; and we think again of the isolated line underwriting Something


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Else. In This is the Latest, the arguments and counter-arguments of

creation and evolution, nature and nurture, exist not as hard antitheticals

but as ingredients held in suspension together: that briny speech

stream contains them all, the angel and the egg, the gag and the gauge.

I would like to conclude with the idea that, as the vertiginous complexity

of this poem's final sentence might suggest, navigating the speech stream

of Mlinko's work is itself an act of language acquisition. We are regaled

with the weird, obsolete or eccentric vocabularies and constructions she

so thoroughly enjoys, linguistic resources that are themselves imperilled;

we learn to wield the latest additions to the global English lexicon; and we

are invited to view language as evolution-in-progress, participating as

active readers in her virtuoso displays. If in our ordinary lives, as Dehaene

has suggested, we suppress some of the differences between words, does

poets ask us to de-suppress, to let ourselves be sensitised to every last

distinction, and overload our circuits with a granularity of information

they are not quite fit to handle? What does that do to those circuits? Does it

perhaps enlarge them? The resounding answer Shoulder Season provides is

Yes.


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