by Martin Corless-Smith
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Six Nights at Nonsuch Palace
Houses can make you act oh so romantic. Years after you’ve moved from an old home, there might exist the compulsion to stare at it like it’s some old friend or dog or food-find. If it used to be brown but has since been painted yellow, it’s not the house’s fault.
So how about looking at a library. A great big one, one housing as best it can the entire history of human composition, imagination, thought, and language. Even the books that aren’t in there are in there because the idea of books and their importance is in there—the idea, at least, that there have been great minds willing to bend themselves around questions most knew very well couldn’t be answered because the discovery of ineffable clarifications were perhaps clarification enough.
Exeunt library and books. Return “house,” but not the kind you can watch: the kind constructed entirely of the language you’ve read, will read, have written, will write. It’s a house you don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving to take a nostalgic glimpse at, anywho, because it’s always around in the same way: one part self, one part everything not-self, two parts the complete annihilation of both: the moment something resembling truth has been arrived at via language, we’re reminded in Martin Corless-Smith’s fourth book, it has little to do with the lucky poet or his body, and instead becomes a shingle on a more universal house of language that has kept us warm for a couple of millennia now.
With a seriousness that can only be described as “British,” Martin Corless-Smith takes two steps back from the house of language to genuinely watch it; in doing so, he’s able to discover that it’s at once futile and vital to sidle up and slap on a little vinyl siding of his own.
Ok, house as metaphor, got it. But while one idea is scarcely enough to anchor a whole collection, Corless-Smith’s fragmented, phrasey, lyrical, almost awkwardly ambitious attempt to grapple with—well, everything— sustains this, his fourth book. A poem segment (it is, in many cases, difficult to discern what is a “poem” and what is a part of another “poem”) might begin with generalization (“We wish to prolong what we can see and touch and talk of / We can do the work of the universe), but end with dazzling and evasive lyric:
The coombes breed whole families
daintiest snails in saxifrage & moschatel
the spurge and spurge laurel
saffron-heared primrose greenish in the light of its own leaves
Corless-Smith makes it clear early on he intends to remove himself from things as they stand for the sake of lyric exploration: “My quarrels I dissolve, and my former deeds.” The exploration itself is all over the place; he goes to the beginning, so to speak, searching for the Sabine Villa, the physical location from which Horace wrote. He emerges, however slightly, as skeptic rather than cynic:
Happy enough in my Sabine farm
the grave lends an ear to free the poor man
I shall quit the towns of men
Even now the winter gathers over my shoulder
We’re also taken to a remote Hebridean island where the house/language metaphor is its most explicit. A brief note at the beginning of the section notes that “During WW 2 the poet William Williamson worked as a radio operator on a remote Hebridean island. A series of poetic fragments and long prose pieces were later found written on the walls of his weaver’s cottage.” The section transcribes some specific Williamson lyrics, and offers some of the book’s most lucid concepts:
Now, in this poetry of fragment after fragment we
experience more than just the poem and its outside,
we experience the simultaneity of many poems, all
poems, with their own ends and their beginnings—
their readings—intersecting—their lives in the space
of being read—on the page just now we see self-
consciously noted a fourth-dimensionality.
Corless-Smith is up and down over his various fragmented series, inhabiting both inspiration and torment, most commonly caught in the hopeful/desperate middle:
choked with a toad in its throat
the snake was unable to swallow
the toad was unable to die
He’s captivating when analytical, when lyrical, when mentioning swallows or the act of swallowing, when quoting an abundance of great writers, and when slipping almost completely into obscurity. For all his depth and density, though, on occasion some heavy notions are settled with weaker ones, or with weak metaphor, as when “the cost of the journey” is “now part of history / leaves to a tree.”
Which reminds us of course that writing great lyric is painstaking. On several occasions Corless-Smith seems almost obsessed with his own limitations, presenting cross-outs and revealing the indecision involved in realizing a poem—whether outlining an idea is necessary, or letting it lie implicit with fragment presents a truer truth. So those who’ve done it well are to be celebrated, and that they can be celebrated by exiting the limitations of the flat reality of things as they are and inhabiting the impossible house of language they unwittingly constructed. In the end, the book—the poet too? Up to you—possesses a mania that leaves you feeling you’ve been there to return.
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