The Glazier’s Choice – Charles Wilkinson (2)
EYEWEAR Publishing 2019
My previous reviews of Charles Wilkinson: HERE
PART TWO (continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/08/the-glaziers-choice-charles-wilkinson/)
When I continue to read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below . . .
VIEW
“swindling shadows grow”
A most dense and textured poem as an essay on regret, by the configurativeness of a former forest growing around you.
I am getting to repeat myself with praise… Another poem worthy of a large audience, those used to reading similar classics in the twentieth century style, but here with a sense of tradition vying with modernism. But which overshadows which?
VACANT POSSESSION
“& leave their shadows
behind?”
Taking one’s spirit of abode with you, is like leaving a poem behind for others to live in, shadowy enough to configure a new meaning from?
MOVING
“Memory crops the past.”
…as poems like this place mixed feelings, pangs, recriminations, ghosts and other subtleties upon it like words’ art installation. More moving moments about moving.
A feeling intellect’s way to crap the past if not crop it?
FOR EVER, AS IF
“you style us a
way of singing”
A wonderful Wilkinsonnation, and an evocation of playing vinyl records.
YEARBOOK
Text of words writ like a green summer scene’s psammology with two ampersands towards dusk or a scrying within a work by Mark Valentine.
INDELIBLE
“and tears but half reach
the eye, for loss kept
in the heart lives
but cannot cry.”
Possibly the most effectively moving poem about moving memories happy and sad that you will be privileged to read.
BOYS ON THE TRAIN
A telling portrait of the attenuity of existence today as nothing is remembered out of the window; simply what colours you see on a screen have any hope of sticking.
The poet as glazier?
FORME
“: books so corvid-clever”
…a poem whereby one becomes an intaglio of words, print setting, book stitching or gluing.
NOT FINDING
Finding a dry echoless never found in the well of self?
The last poem poignantly in the section of this book headed by its eponymous title.
The next section is headed –
The Hideaway Sleep
And the first poem in it headed –
TEL
“the purity of what goes missing”
Including this poem’s meaning –
So, I’ll ring Bradley Gardener to find it,
BROWN STUDIES
“so little forest
to hide in or hold”
A telling human journey through life toward death as symbolised by wood and the purposes put to it,
Couched in nursery rhyme sounds and meaninglesses as mnemonics.
RAINFOREST, SHAME AND E-DELETE
A highly sophisticated expression of nature and logging-off and other rivers of thought transatlantic…
Ashamed to fail to fully download….
A-WALKING RAIN
One of the most vulnerable yet powerful poetic expressions of the susceptibility of one’s house to the elements, with its own stanza-slates diagonal and jagged across the page,
HIDEAWAY SLEEP
From fardel to folderol, this is surely another classic. Seems to me to be the most meaning-tantalised apotheosis of what Wilkinson’s fiction has meant to me for the last few years.
BARON
“…his words soft
and burnished syntax;”
A poem that continuously escapes me but one I truly appreciate. A painting by words. As well as describing a painting. I wonder. The words of the man in the blue blazer, meanwhile, are imagined. As is the watch’s ticking. Whatever the case, the painter couldn’t get the eyes quite right, I guess. Though, the poet did.
BOW-TIGHT
I imagine this is the hangover – half waking consciousness, half dozing co-vivid dream – of a man who had been to a champagne party the previous night in a DJ.
MORNING FIGURE
Another haunting poetic conjuring of this poet’s fiction (or vice versa), a waking from that hideaway sleep by an Aickman-like shape of a man….
ANAESTHETISING THE AREA
“It is a plea for the end of torment, a prayer for the triumph of nothing;”
I still genuinely wonder why this is a not a more famous poet, and with that fact this poem.
The tentatively poetic apotheosis of aligned contiguity in a painful or dangerous bodily process with places and weather,
CUTTINGS
Rushes proleptic of harvested memories.
HYPNAGOGIC
“floating truth”
An intensely rarefied prophecy of today’s onset of co-vivid dreaming as imparted to us here by lines once subject to enjambment now rejoined but with false gaps…
THE NIGHT VOICE
Dreams like a symphony by Antheil or Varese.
THE HOUSE OF SONG LOST IN THE CARPENTER’S TERMS
A song as poetic clambering between landings with a timbre of timber. A masterstroke of a poem.
Why are there not more people threading up such stairs or at least following a real-time review of this important poetry book?
STORM-CROSSED
The storm as the “eyewall” of the mind’s life.
Another tantalising poem to eke out in swirls of reading.
THE LACEMAKER LOOKING FOR A PATTERN
“motifs as more than flow
the days’ yield of connections”
A finely worked metaphor in the elements for the pattern-seeker in me, toward gestalt…
THE WOODEN GODS
Surely, this must be the only configured poem that conveys gods as spiritual things as well as textured ones. Amazing revolution with words and concepts and myths,
SAWN & SHAPED
This is another fine example of the ultra-tantalising word-shaped sensitivity of Wilkinson poetry. Nature and dream and tactile texture and shadows as stains.
THRAXACUM TRISTE
I challenge anyone to understand this poem, however many times it is read.
I have done little else since the previous review entry above.
The acme of meaninglessness.
QUEEN ANNE’S LACE
I felt I was slipping down a narrow tower of words like ripping lace not as a regal bodice ripper but as someone co-sharing a witch’s brew and its ingredients.
YELLOW ARCHANGEL
I learn a lot about things reading Wilkinson, here about a Nettle like the swell not so much of the sea but of stung skin.
The Sting in Yellow.
Or not.
APPOINTMENT
A very clever poem about health checks and the forms we are asked to fill in at appointments.
A word to the whites, not the pupils.
THE HOUSE OF INHERITANCE
Anxiety expressed by various stanzas as to the coded diseases or growths being passed between generations of the same family.
Text and porous akin skin alike.
THE BLUE JUMPER
This is potentially my favourite, if the most disarmingly distressing, poem in the book, a masterpiece of a child-like drawing as an objective-correlative of death by drowning. A jumper in a jumper. One potentially mad as the other is blue. Or not mad at all?
NIGHT VISION
“our drive
is looking well for
guides on the dark fiat road”
Our spiritual tapetum lucidum, as pages are flat but the darkness rears above them like holograms of horror stories? Maybury kicked a cat at the start of his stay at the Hospice after driving there….
REGARDING ROWANS
“autumn’s anaemia is parsed
as parts of death & graves”
The tree of life and its berries, but ‘strength before the fall’? A wildly misunderstood poem. One that is entirely incomprehensible, but it strengthened my reading sinews in the process of trying to prove its meanings were clear. And as in most of these Wilkinson poems of enjambments and line-sinews and para-typographies and semi-semantics and tongue torques of phonetics, all of these things and thoughts are tractable for their own sake. Al dente. But are the berries poisonous?
PRIVATE MEANS NOT SAYING
“This was
My life, you said.”
This is so comprehensible but still with a sense of that ‘al dente’ strength chewed over in the previous entry above.
A character study of a lonely man who read the FT, a schoolteacher. If such potentially sad poignancy is a strength, this is it,
ANTI-PASTORAL
“yet the syllables survive
the anti-grammar”
A city as the antipasto of the past’s first course brought into an ‘al dente’-worded story vehicle now burnt out into the countryside, where our man in the previous poem once walked. His thoughts of history and now his present that became or was soon to become our past. Or a tranche of that, starting and ending with an elliptical dash. A dash for growth, or Alexander Pope.
NOT BY ME
Just as this review was also not by me. Because I am a sensible, diligent man who obeys all the rules of reviewing.
This poem rhymes and scans and thus, ironically, is in battle with the rest of the book. It is the final masterpiece, this one without ‘al dente’ antipastos, and should be read aloud like Adrian Mitchell once read aloud in my presence his ‘Tell Me Lies…’
It would make that unfamous man above famous. I now have no doubts.
END