Customer Reviews

Of Piscator: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's as if the poet managed the almost impossible: to make contemporary techniques combine with the traditional in such a way that he turns on his head both the old and the new. If the Charles Bernsteins and Bruce Andrews of the Language poets make you long for song, for feeling of the old poetries, you must turn to Martin Corless-Smith. You will not miss the disjunctive, discordant alogical manipulations of contemporary poets, but you will also hear the rich sounds of a language achieved by a poet who is as steeped in the solid rhythms of Old English monosyllables--"hound heavens house"--as in the sonorities of Chaucer...It is that retention of music in his lines that makes Corless-Smith a most uncanny, original postmodern poet, singing the contradiction and disorders of the millennium.

I have just "discovered" this poet and reading his poetry over and over again means rediscovering language, sound, wit, and everything else that I love about poetry. I consider his language Old English, with pastoral themes in a post-modern context. Very interesting.

"MC-S is an Englishman who has worked in the US for some years and perhaps the transatlantic shift underwrites the quick-change dialect of these poems--they ARE dialect poems of a kind, although they skate across a variety of vernaculars; grammar fractures without undue force, fragments of older written English float through. Quasi-folk-rhymes break up narratives, the 'songs' seem ghosts of untold stories. The title sequence formalises the multivocality by identifying speakers in the manner of a play, introducing a disjointedness I feel uneasy with; there is a more flowing transition from the opening Songs to the impressive closing sequence To Absent Minister. Good balance between sound-control and unruliness. I can't identify all the voices and prefer the mystery of it anyway, but Clare keeps turning up (rhythms and textures of the journals rather than the poems) and I hear David Jones now and again. And nice to meet Mr. Beddoes on page 16.

For some tastes, the playful mode of nonsense verse which Corless-Smith often engages in might wear thin. Yet with a little patience (and a dictionary), even the most dense passages prove inventive and rich. The style of Of Piscator is highly original, and even idiosyncratic. Given this fact, it adapts to a remarkable emotional range