The Glazier’s Choice – Charles Wilkinson
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
The Glazier’s Choice
THE WORDS MOVING AWAY
“Fields delete themselves
on journeys, leaving an after-image of greenness;”
A most tantalising free verse or prose broken by fruitful arguably random enjambment, the words moving away literally, as I wonder whether I as Proustian self am on a train journey with a purpose broken, too, by stolen or lost property (property including my words) or is it a gratuitous journey to whatever unmanned halt breaks its journey there. Whatever the case, it works — or is lost because its first line (the first line in the whole book) has arguably had one of its words stolen by apparent typo?
VOID POST
I yearned to post the whole poem as my review of it.
There is no other way of dealing with its tantalising thoughts. The poem that is the missive waiting in the “cool dark hall” of my reading mind. Some call this mind of mine an “empty house”!
This will be a very vacant review if I need to make all of its entries start with the same sentence as this one does above, but I suspect I will yearn to do so!
LOOKING IN
The telling poetic vision of a neighbour who is the grey rainy ‘you’ when Keeping Up With The Sunshiny Joneses next door. But their sun is false or imported like in those neighbouring Boxes of ‘Klara and the Sun’?
At least your rain is real!
THE GLAZIER’S CHOICE
“no sound, apart from
the white page turning”
The perfect couplet in the perfect childhood mnemonics of non-alphabetised quatrains of panes or pains before memories are lost to that all too predictable white page’s turning.
Better a proper page than an electronic click, though, I guess. Before the eyes are glazed.
Cross-referenced a few minutes later here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/24864-2/#comment-15457
NO LONGER THE ONLY
Only the Lonely by Roy Orbison, this is a wide spaced lined poem of a new loneliness transcended following a bereavement— and the sharing of the sororal seasons along the tarred roads you once walked together.
RULE
“First thorny words
Follow the spike”
An apt poem to resonate with my earlier review today of a triangular square here, an Onions ghost story to match the lines of countryside and rail, and as a premonition in such wordage of today’s mangled misangles of life.
“Red rails that lead
Downwards…”
BOARDING THE DARK
Makes no joined up sense whichever way one takes the typesetting’s indicators of reading order; yet I sensed a repeat performance of journeys in this book, sigils of fieldpathway directions within a forest of dream but a forest without the frost.
HIDDEN
“…where darkness
furies at your feet.”
A haunting poem of free verse with skilful chance enjambment, where what is hidden in the poet’s ‘process’ of sleep and waking day that he seeks seems hidden within in or between the words and their meaning in this poem, too. Thick on the tongue like dream.
A reviewer such as me may be one of those ‘gods’ he or she seeks? Any morning reviewer or, indeed, reader scarce these days for poetry books with things hidden in them?
HALF-HERACLITEAN
I often mention Zeno in my reviews, but I have a faulty half hook cast upon the waters to catch Heraclitus, and that metaphor of angling is exploited semi-eclectically in this poem…but I know nothing about fishing.
THE DEFECTIVE LENS
This happens to be the perfect complement to the story ‘Heavenly Love’ that I read only an hour ago here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/through-the-storm-rosalie-parker/#comment-21968
THE TRUE SUN
A narrow poem that strikes me as if it inspired Ishiguro’s latest novel.
THE CLEARANCE
“The cam-
ber’s different now:”
An effective physically narrow poetic prose piece as free verse that compares then and now when childhood memories of distance and slope and endface have been cleared by diggers and smooths. See my comments on O Henry’s Squaring the Circle here.
THE TRAIN LIBRARY
An amazing poem; it ought to be ever-anthologised!
I can visualise the word structures and geometries and pop-up maps of streets as a book trolley or steam train travels the maze of library stations or carrels…
But that only skims the surface and tells you of just a few sidings in this reading journey of enjambment and frustration at odd points delays or more, condensed down and up into a distillation from its poetic lines.
MACON EVENINGS GOLD
This seems to give an intriguingly oblique complement to the concept TERROIR in this author’s MILLS OF SILENCE, reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/15/mills-of-silence-charles-wilkinson/
TWO GARDENS
For Mary K. Wilkinson
this feels like deep-
ly felt verse and my
faith in where each en-
jambment falls as meaningful
is unimpeachable as
the two gardens
one with bench silvered with age and the other with peacocks and a slain sheikh
seep a synergy of sadness as well as beaut-
y and fantas-
y
WATER LAUGHING
…and flowing.
Another fine free-flowing enjambment towards a footnote about a Sufi philosopher who founded the “illuminationist tradition.”
ORDER
“It’s this prayer to a god of sequence who holds each kite
of memory on the line.”
Wilkinson poetry is satisfyingly textured, disarmingly complex and accessible by instinct if not always by ratiocination.
Having just read this poem, I now know why I thought this half an hour ago HERE:
“ Her destiny was to be in this book? My destiny to read it, the way I am reading it – and reading it piecemeal day by day like this makes me feel able to change things I have not yet read.”
before reading this poem!
TWITCH
A striking, deeply enjambed poem of growing old as seen via the birds seen or twitched.
THE TEACHER’S CLOTHES DYED IN-SERVICE
A niffy poem that reminds me of my old Latin teacher, and his pungent green-mouldy gown. Don’ t know why.
TO HIS SUCCESSOR
“The black memory stick
Will save all that I wish
To forget.”
A finely time-tuned poem. The hot desking of memory, sticking one person using it to the next. Sticky enough to stay? No, for it’s the hot desking of life and death. Succeeding and failing, then succeeding again.
I have submitted this great poem, without the poet’s name attached to it, to a small on-line poetry discussion group to which I belong.
After that, this poet has at least two more fans! Honestly.
They decried my theory of hot-desking as a resonance with the furnace at the end!
LEAVING
A heartfelt poem that indirectly resonates with me, about leaving the teaching profession. Every ex teacher should read it,
SIX MONTHS
“This autumn
he was seen counting the leaves
before men in yellow jackets came
and put them into bags.”
Another haunting portrait,
this time of…
A tramp or, after ‘Leaving’, a Christopher Jefferies arrested?
CHANGE OF USE
“reading books in the ha ha;”
This is possibly, after due reflection, my favourite ever poem! Honestly.
I can easily imagine my own old school also turned into a retirement home, by the way.
DOUBLE VISION
From the head Blake,
To the rough awakening with a hangpver to
The second sight,
This is just another example why this poet is fast becoming the favourite poet of me and my wife.
Double vision, indeed.
A writer we can share, as weird stories are not our combined thing.
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THE STORYTELLER
A perfect character study of a cad or wide boy or bounder — a storyteller in the worst sense, unlike this author who is also one, outside his poetry as well as within it, in the best sense.
THE HUMOUR TREE
A humorously en-
jambed work about a silver birch that twists stagly from childhood to an older man in a pub restaurant holding its stump or stuffing his own. Tantalising because nobody can be sure what great poems REALLY mean!
THE IRISH SEMIOLOGIST ADVISES THE POET
A sort of country man looking at quite different country folk, although both countries in the same country. Very telling and yet another classic. Why is this poet not a famous poet? Although a rhetorical question, one that I fully feel needs asking.
I genuinely wrote this review a couple of days ago but forgot to post it here! —
FLIGHT ESCAPE
A poem about swifts, and broadly shaped like one of them.
Today, ironically, during a heatwave, I hoped not to winter in sunlit Africa at all!
JACKDAWS
Another tantalising masterpiece!
A cross between Walter de la Mare, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes and Charles Wilkinson, with the last one influencing the other three!
This review will continue here in due course: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/970-2/