Touching Distances – Anne Cluysenaar
CINNAMON PRESS 2014
When I review these poems, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
CINNAMON PRESS 2014
When I review these poems, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
CINNAMON PRESS 2014
When I review these poems, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
2010
“For now, let me send my future unself a smile”
I have just read the first two poems (7 & 8 Dec, 2010), and I wonder how I have resisted revisiting this poet after fifty years. Staggered by the magical wordplay that no review can possibly touch, especially with the trite word magical.
The unself towards a gestalt akin to my Nemonymous? Touching distances, indeed.
A giant poet as my once literary ‘mother’ to be lifted lightly in now old arms with utter seriousness.
A tantalising glimpse of an almost-death of a pekin bantam in an ice tray leaving a bit of itself behind as a sort of cryological soul? Touching distances.
I leave bits of myself in books that I Gestalt Real-Time Review….?
“…Girl-child not worth full attention.”
A telling dwelling, via Borges and chess, uoon the poet’s memory of her seemingly distant father. Touching distances, yet again.
Today I castled this poem with my rook.
“Overnight snow.”
Warm bed, laywoman waiting her man to return through the cold, herself listening to Mozart clarinet, visualising cadenzas unwritten but exalting each other.
This is mighty poetry indeed, to a poetry layman like me, even if a gestalt real-time reviewer of fiction.
Words from those barely remembered dead, ‘jostling’ each other like ‘foreseen’ and ‘unforeseen’, as bell and clapper. This poem rings in my head and I still can’t staunch its resonance.
“…solstice.”
Significant that I have read this today on the cusp of 21/3/2018.
Learnt of the simple but surprisingly revealed contrast between menstrual blood and the blood of war.
Touching distances alongside the ancient Welsh poet Henry Vaughan.
I’ll quote a whole stanza about the poet being looked at by her beloved mischievous cat, as I found it very striking as the apotheosis of ‘touching distances’ in a human sense …
“It’s like being looked at by time, unconscious,
ancestral, alien — by the cats who bred her
near the pyramids, in a world as real
as ours will be, when we’re all gone.”
“at this turning point, the hinge of the year.”
A thoughtful poem about a Christmas Tree, and its galactic accoutrements. Strangely I just reviewed a few minutes ago (https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/of-doomful-portent-matthew-m-bartlett/#comment-11993) a vignette about a wild turkey, also to which the above quote from this poem seems highly appropriate.
“in candle light, whatever comes next.”
Memories of a father who fathered memories of sung syllables and the sacrament of an occasion dawning at midnight.
2011
The durability of a smell throughout future’s changes. The smell of summer’s hay in winter. Hey, that is somewhat sad. Crisp enjambment breaking the smooth and even prose.
Of a shrimp’s synchronicity.
Resonated with my recent liaison with The Shape of Water via Caitlín R Kiernan and Priya Sharma. For my reviews of these authors (or indeed of any authors of whom you want to read my gestalt real-time review), simply google ‘their name’ and ‘gestalt’. It almost always works.
“turn it upside down to see if it ‘holds’!”
This poetically giddy vision of a pram being wheeled on a zebra crossing still holds, like books do when I treat them to gestalt real-time reviewing. They hold, in fact, from all angles, eventually, the more of us who do it to the same book, and then compare our findings, triangulating its coordinates…
The ultimate, perhaps, in touching distances by the means of poetry. This poem is exquisite, about the taking of a photo of the poet when a toddler, a poem addressed to the future of that photo’s photographer.
Another poem of ‘holding’, now ‘steadying’ time evenescent, via Virgil and Dante.
I also saw a dipped set of headlights. And touching distances with our dead ones.
To ‘dare the mud’ as far as one could walk, a sort of retrocausal portrait of the Severn flash or bore, two men and a boy, the silt of distances.
Dodging potholes on a car journey on a rainy night has always been a metaphor for life itself. And now it’s a practical part of life, too, even or especially this relatively short distance from when the poem was first written.
Which painting of the Malay Archipelago to lend, all of which paintings focus retrocausally to the original gestalt desire to BE in future’s different ways?
Back towards a heart of darkness.
“— differently evolved, differently evolving.”
The ultimate vision of ‘touching distances’, tantalising perspectives of human and cosmic, a world being made of several Einsteinian earths as vantage points.
“, a church half-drowned”
A description of a woodcut of flood in 1607.
Words like wood gouged out.
A small local church engloutie, if church is a feminine noun.
“. Might be a pregnant woman.”
“: what led us to plant just here”
A poem to serendipity, with chickens and trees.
My reviews tap into serendipity, I hope.
“It slipped away, but not away from itself.”
My birthday in 2011. And I am still here, if no longer there.
This process of flickering in and out of life in natural creatures I shall henceforth called Cluysenaaring. Not Cloisonné work.
“repeated by something not human or not fully known,”
As reader or reviewer, I found this wonderful poem ungraspable of or by me?
A Marsh Arab returns to Eden
“For ever is not the point. Never can be.
It’s all for now. To have been again.
‘The water, the nature the fish and the birds…’”
And my dreamcatcher net, “so fine, so white, fans out.”
“But it sings, it sings. Only a myth could say so!”
Here a severed head afloat on the sea. Absurd sacrifice, but yet it sings, absurd, yes, but no doubt cruel to be kind? Like hitting it with a hammer for its song?
Strangely in tune with this poem of an INTRO DIVE that I read and reviewed here a few minutes ago,
“…lonely, lonely,
too lonely perhaps to know it,…”
This is the ultimate ‘touching distance’ poem.
In a cosmic and human observational way.
Reading it. Sorry I kept you so long before reaching it.
“bore with the sparrow-hawk, balanced the risks”
People moving in and out, kitchen freshly painted.
Mundane and significant in gestalt, and people or friends as part of the pattern that only a real poem can supply, rhymes and assonances, or not.
“, each wave
an impulse from far away.”
Another touching distance. A striking poem of the sea and the earth that it will one day surround, a poem that manages to get your head round that impossible conceit. And other conceits, too.
A poem portrait of frogs mating in her pond, a pond that “purred / like a giant cat,”
“mealy with droppings of bat and bird, strong enough”
Pub talk of a wood’s and its trees’ belongings – and belonging to each of us, as we are belonged in our turn, I guess. Like only families understand within each one.
(After the Christchurch earthquake)
“…alzheimers could still find
places in mind to go to, if beyond words.”
A poem that co-resonates perfectly with one just this minute I read, with my thoughts here:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/the-fallen-west-douglas-thompson/#comment-13053
“, clarinet again.”
As I picked up this poem, a clarinet piece started playing on Radio 3.
This poem is about googling Spohr. This poem’s spore or spoor?
Google as a poetic inspiration…
In the last day or so I happen to have read pieces about significant googling, like Chapter 4 here this morning…https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/the-boke-of-the-divill-reggie-oliver/#comment-13062
Saturday 5 March 1936
“…to note music down on a silent page.”
Thoughts of the poet’s mother, her mother’s loss of Goethe and a piano, as she moved from Dresden to Britain. A prophecy of Brexit outdoing history’s, herstory’s bravery….?
Tsunami and nuclear fallout in Japan
“…on the edge…”
Balanced on a haiku between peaceful sea and its broken enjambment. This poem itself is the poignant peaceful sea…
At the grave of Henry Vaughan
“. A shadow leaning
across the valley from Pen-y-fan.”
Sounds today like a place in N Korea! But a poem with Henry Vaughan ingredients, a revery at his graveside. Striking enjambment here, as a way of working something loose, not splitting the atom as such but worrying and teasing at the joint where the sense of least resistance occurs in a sentence, thus creating parasitism from synergy, or vice versa.
Considering a house-move
“, someone to welcome
by the slant of a chair,”
Seeing suddenly where you have lived for many years through others’ eyes.
Or touching distances between here and there…
“The page darkens with criss and cross —“
The evolution of the present for the survivor of someone’s death, this poem being one of many poems she could have written? This book, too. Distances change depending whence you try to touch them…
“hints of nightmare in dream after dream”
Ends and beginnings. A poet’s poetry book is read in different ways according to whether he or she is dead and, if dead, the nature of that death. The same text, but a different poem.
A dream
“I like to think of swimmers above me,
at ease in the water, children at play.”
Two strangers trust each other, despite a recent murder. But do they know they are both in someone else’s dream? Or someone else’s poem?
Walking with Tony Connor near Tal-y-bont
“though children’s legs in flip-flops, wreathed
by ripples, show the current still strong.”
And the previous dream or poem’s current still strong around us? Containing two aging walkers. Youthful, perhaps, elsewhere.
“Was. Not yours? Hatred”
1/9 today, too. A new past in embryo. About to leap off in even greater anger.
Very telling with this poem of cave painting.
The Spanish pot
“must fall upward, leave emptiness.”
Seems an axiom for our times.
“sign of forgotten uses.”
Bit Irish, most English, this poem touches distances between languages and between memories of an island holiday with someone, memories for after you have died, I guess.
Driving over the Epynt firing-range
“But, but —“
Like gunfire?
Risking the smell of gorse, even when warned by red flags.
The poet’s trope for life.
“‘Old men should be explorers.’”
I, an old man, enjoy vicariously the adventure of tasting the plum jam that came from a feisty old woman climbing a tree in this poem. And the young ones, too, who may taste it.
“, autumn sheaves.”
Byrd song in reversal. Mesmerising music.
Finding an abandoned wasps’ nest
“…ghosted to a work of art.
Line by line, shade by shade, overlapping,”
At the Quaker meeting
“a single thread, wafting slowly
from seen to unseen and back”
Conkers, expressed as feeling a man’s balls?
A dream of carrying shoes and poem-typescripts.
Myth as flesh and blood. Confusion of space and time.
Purple beads, a sort of grasping after a tantalising fruit? Ripeness, beyond a classical (painted?) look. “The taste of here.”
Surely a poem not of the moment, unlike the others, but one of historic immigrants and border guards,
“— like a little poem
cut off from the rest of language,…”
“That mother has rested her chin
on the baby’s head…”
Of sea otters.
“Clausner … Cleusners … Clusener … Klausener … Kluisenaar …”
Santa Cluysenaar?
“a flight of swans […]
What a straight line they were making
How well they must know their way.”
“something that catches the eye. And is gone.”
“If or rother when I come back, I want to be a musician.”
Or a poet?
“Thinking rather than looking I’ve lost
my focus: I see two identical men
playing that fiddle, one rather closer
than the other, as if in some other dimension.”
Above I show the final significant quatrain.
Touching distances of self?
2012
.1/1/12
“And he had her by the neck…”
Hatching eggs in near snow, in near hopeless life, someone or something saying sorry as the one to whom sorry should be said instead?
Starts with a WG Sebald quote that obliquely pre-echoes the nature of the poet’s death?
And, later, from the poem itself:-
“, two lives
confront each other. A kind of hell.
A kind of heaven.”
Hunting the Higgs
A retrocausality. Echoing the quote I made at the the start of this review above: “For now, let me send my future unself a smile”
Unexpected roses endure, but loveliness broken?
“A change of key.
Pain to the throat.”
A childhood dream
One two, one two.
“in my head I see the angle
of her hands so clearly, holding
his horns.”
“the four of us, two couples that woukdn’t last.”
“One of us now is dead,”
Being taught in the fifties by Donald Davie
“Any good poem can be read to a stranger on a train
without embarrassment.”
My mother’s sketchbook
“I see it here, as she happened to see it”
“Life.”
“, mere words
vibrating too, more song than thought.”
For Tim Rossiter, whose painting ‘The Alphabet of Taliesin’ explores the pursuit of Gwion Bach by Ceridwen.
“— another (a coming) self —“
Remembering my cob Pip, who died March 8, 2012
A moving account of the accident and the dry clod that was the permanent memorial of a hoof step.
A caterpillar
“explosions of grip, looping and looping!”
For Ruth Bidgood, reading in Aberystwyth at the launch of ‘Above the Forests’
“I used, as a child, to imagine my death,…”
And tellingly what still happens beyond her death.
A conversation
“‘The’ and ‘The’.”
“Is that why we laughed, talking of death?
Less feared than it was when further off.”
Sowing wildflower seeds
Scarifying and stamping…
Is death a “generative cold”, I wonder?
Its beauty is also in how I have read it. A book of iconic as well as personal poems. They deserve reading to seed or seal their iconicity. Slowly over a year and in one sitting.
Anne Cluysenaar, tragically murdered in recent years, was an influential instigation of my on-going thoughts leading to Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing, thoughts on the Intentional Fallacy, Russian Formalism, and other methods of flensing literature, a hindsight influence, a legacy garnered by me during her Stylistics course at Lancaster University: 1966-69, when I was a student there.
I did mention her here briefly a few years ago, but there may be other mentions that I have made publicly over the years which now seem untraceable – https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/letters-from-oblivion-andrew-condous/#comment-2101
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