When
I open poetry books or magazines for the first time, it’s often at the back, or
at random. I’m glad I read My Moriarty from the front, because the
first few pages of this Flarestack-published pamphlet gave me a memorable new-poetry-reading
experience. So much so that when Rialto editor Michael Mackmin said he’d
got five poems by Nichola Deane, I couldn’t wait to read them. (The Winter issue has just gone to the printers
and will be out soon – I think it’ll be great.)
The
opening poem in My Moriarty, ‘Elizabeth
Bishop and the Card Table’, is a dream poem in which Bishop is “weirdly part of
the fabric, ontological / as a chair’.
There are many dream poems around but few of them capture the essence of
dream as effectively as this one:
and us playing a game the dream
calls Intricacy and Gesture,
won and lost in the blind spells,
the jump-cuts of sleep.
Whatever she says, and I can’t know
now, ever,
it’s the feeling in the words that
stays and stays,
that’s in me this moment, sweet and
flickery like the flight
of a wren, tail-up, here before it
got here,
Immediately
the writer establishes herself as someone who can do both metaphor and
metaphysics. There’s also a sort of
relish about this poem and throughout the pamphlet: it’s catching.
Subject
matter has something to do with it. This
may be partly personal, though adoration of Bishop is a common enough phenomenon. Next comes a poem, ‘Towards Suaineabhal’, containing
a Hebridean mountain. “Nakedness / in rags, the bones of a thing in rags,
unwilling / to plead” perfectly catches the lumpy bareness of that landscape. Again,
Deane gets at the essence:
How does a mountain occur to you?
How can it?
…
A mountain happens to you while its
strata stay put:
it is slipping forever under your
thought
remaining and remaining while you
can’t help but move
through time and space like a leaf
unleashed from its tree.
The
largeness of that question and the whole passage has something American about
it. You can read the poem here.
Then
there’s a list poem addressed to the letter/symbol/shape ‘X’, in all its
manifestations from girder to kisses to
Exactitude, the place on the
treasure map
discoverable only with all the
difficulties
of ardour, subterfuge and
double-cross,
or the double-loss found in the
moment
the searching stops in exhaustion
and want.
The
sometimes punning echoes (exactitude/map, cross/loss/stops) are
characteristic. I think they help
express relish. The Bishop poem has “back…
lack… blackly… fabric” in the first five lines.
A less stylish and precise writer mightn’t get away with it.
All
those three poems take unexpected turns – the reader’s inability to predict where
next makes the act of reading feel like a fairground ride.
The
next poem, ‘Maw’, is a sonnet, whose echoes take the form of gentle and
irregularly placed half-end-rhymes. The opening
and end are especially beautiful; here are the first three lines:
We speak as if the heart breaks only
once
when really whatever it is I mean by
heart
dies in me daily as the Evangelist
said it should.
Then
there’s a long, raw yet controlled and very moving mother poem, with a
difficult story behind it. Not what one
might have predicted from what’s gone before. The same applies to the poem after that, in
the voice of Fru Ida Hammershøi, the wife of the painter whose haunting
interiors were exhibited in London a few years ago. Rooms were either empty, or showed Ida with
her back turned.
 |
| Interior (1893) by Vilhelm Hammershøi |
That’s
a third of the way through the pamphlet and only with the next poem did I come
back to earth. A red dress lies discarded
on the floor, bringing memories; the poem is accomplished by any standards, and
my reaction only reflects the exceptional quality of what went before it.
There
are more exceptional poems towards the end, including the title poem, whose
speaker takes delight in planning an encounter worthy of a love/hate
relationship (“my darling conundrum”) more intriguing than anything in Sherlock. Another empty mountain poem, with sun this
time, reflects the bleaker Hebridean version,
and ‘Wittgenstein’s Deckchair’ on the final page mirrors the opening Bishop
poem. This time, instead of a dream-room
it’s entirely imaginary, and “like a boat / between shores”. Here again we get that winning combination of
metaphors that really hit the spot and playful metaphysical speculation. Here are the last few lines:
The clownish seriousness of pure
endeavour!
Proximity of illumination, rest
and collapse are suggested by his
choice of
anti-furniture; that and the taut
fabric
of our lives stretching across time
carrying somehow our shape and
warmth,
somehow taking all our weight.
My Moriarty comes from Flarestack, who won last
year’s Michael Marks award for pamphlet publishing. You can buy it here. It’s covetable externally too – very
elegantly produced (apart from the pagination being out), its cover dark royal
blue with white and silver writing, and egg-yolk yellow inside covers.
