The
iambic pentameters of this book-length poem are catching – after reading a few
pages, I start thinking in them. Of
course Shakespeare taught us how much of common and uncommon speech there is in
the form. This book contains both,
mostly the latter, worked with great skill.
Here is the second paragraph (verse? paragraph seems more appropriate) of
‘Archimedes Lullaby’*, the first of six poems that make up the whole.
Distant ocean-engines pulverise
Their underwater mountains, coarse
to fine,
In granite-crumbs and flakes of mica
gold
And particles of ancient olivine;
And water waves sweep back and forth
again,
Materialize, and dematerialize,
Retrieving counted grains and
dropping more
Uncounted grains in heaps along a
shore
Of granite-particled infinities,
Amassing shores for drawing
diagrams.
Behind him, on the shores of Sicily,
His legendary works accumulate:
Discarded toys, forgotten
thought-machines,
And wonder-works, dismantled on the sand:
How
easy this looks, long words and metaphysical thoughts of infinity, change and
decay brought into the lines’ smooth, not-much-enjambed rise and fall. The parts are perfect, the whole is clear, digestible
and rhythmically mesmerising. There’s
more end-rhyme in this section than in some; it’s as if Schnackenberg sets up
an expectation of rhyme at the beginning, and periodically, to sensitise our
ears to its echo, so that they are then satisfied with less, once attuned.
At
this stage, all one knows of the subject is Archimedes, and lullaby. By the end of the first poem, counting grains
of sand in vigintillions has become cyclical, repetitive, a device for
sleeping. We don’t know who is being
reassured by the recurring line,
And hush now, all is well now, close
your eyes,
until
the second poem, ‘Sublimaze’, named after a very strong pain-killer, where we
are in a hospital, at a bedside vigil, and the sense of loss in the first poem
turns specific. The lullaby line
acquires a recurring counterpart:
And all that could be done has now
been done.
Heavenly Questions is an elegy for Schnackenberg’s
husband; the title is the title in English of a very early Chinese poem, “A
series of unanswerable cosmological, philosophical, and mythological questions
which, according to a legend from the second century BCE, the banished poet
wrote on the walls of temples during his wanderings”.
Much
of the poem is set in hospital, while her husband is dying. How to address such a situation, both commonplace
and terrible, so as to make it new?
Schnackenberg overwrites her scene with imagery of doors and locks;
escape-doors to recovery, doors in a searched-for house where no-one has ever
died, doors imagined when imagination is near exhausted.
Then we two, reunited and marooned.
A door drenched radiant orange
beyond the bed
Appearing in a wall of cinder blocks
Lit dimly gray. Then gone. And
evening came
And took the door, frame, handles,
latches, locks,
Even the black cube buried in the
frame
With chisel marks around the mortise
box;
Then took the wall away..
Schnackenberg
flies most free when she riffs and riffs, as she does for two pages on the
legendarily uncountable (like the sand) doors of St Sofia in Istanbul:
Another door was always added: one
Among
the doors that lay under a spell:
Some scraped the floors, with
dark-rubbed radii
On marble thresholds, tilting
underneath
The distant dome’s transferred
weight-bearing load..
Such
passages both are, and are not about what they describe. The narrator’s longing, hoping against all
hope, underlies everything. The extended imagery earns Schnackenberg the
personal:
I reasoned that if someone swept a
hand
And all the locks fell open all at
once
And all the doors fell open, he
would live..
The
sort of mind-game one plays, when there is no way out – she is good at
conveying how the mind behaves in this extreme situation. And
here she riffs on medicine and mortality:
I felt the opiates touch his bluest
veins:
At one a.m., at two a.m., the hour
The weightless, phantom images
inside
Another’s mind dissolve inside one’s
own:
…
The apparition of the body scan,
An apparition from Vesalius,
The Fifth Book of Anatomy, laid bare:
Beloved body, lit in blacks and
grays,
Black-soaked, and streaming in
eternity,
The resurrected cavity of Galen,
In anti-particles. In gamma rays.
A visionary study of the veins,
Merely a blurry shadow on a scan;
And overhead a surgeon turns a page:
Black curtains sewn from bolts of
consciousness
Are held aside by seraphs in black
corners:
A stream of flowing atoms, held
aside.
The presentation of a hidden sight:
Anatomy, which means the “cutting
open,”
From atoms, meaning the “uncuttables,”..
I’d
better stop! There’s another dozen or so
lines of this, and I want to go on typing them, because my interest is caught
and held – by the emotion, the argument, the references and the rhythm that grabs me and won’t
let go.
The
real-life hospital scenes are moving, but often lack the energy and force of
such wider-ranging passages. And there
are parts of the book, mostly later on, including most of the final poem, ‘Bedtime
Mahabharata’, in which Schnackenberg tells
her husband a bedtime story from the epic and philosophises on war, that don’t
grab me. There’s a section where she praises
her husband as he used to be, with many lines like “How could I memorize his
gentle ways. / The way he mingled friendliness with passion..” Why, oh why is this so hard to do well?
It’s
as if it’s intellectual speculation, prompted and underpinned by intense
emotion, that sets Schnackenberg the poet on fire and brings out such rich
imagery and multiple frames of reference.
And all of it shaped by the form.
If one held a world-wide iambic pentameter contest for living poets
(this would be fun), she’d soar straight onto the short-list.
Heavenly Questions is published by Bloodaxe.
*Note
for fellow pedants: there’s no apostrophe after Archimedes.
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| Death of Archimedes, while drawing diagrams in sand |
