prodigal

missing parts: poems 1977-1990, (christchurch: hazard press, 1992)

These poems do interest me.  Not only is the title, Missing Parts, appropriate as an allusion – intended or not – to the ‘Notebooks’ poems which were to comprise the “missing” section 5 and which finally were excluded for reasons of quality, but it also signals the return of the poet Alan Loney, in many respects an absent or at least underepresented figure in recent years.  As the Preface has it, ‘This collection contains all the work done sinc+e the publication of my Shorter Poems 1963-77 in 1979.’

Preferring, in the words of Samuel Beckett, ‘an art that came complete with missing parts,’ Alan permits the gaps, shifts and reconnections – aspects of any writing spanning over a decade – to be evident in the final product.  And in this sense the collection serves a dual purpose, as both a giving account and a taking account.  By a giving account, I mean the way in which Alan’s absence is explained and continuity is emphasised.  The subtitle ‘Poems 1977-1990’ picks up immediately where Shorter Poems 1963-77 leaves off;  there is no hint of a hiatus.  The 77 pages of poems represent an elapsed 13 years, suggesting an unbroken if not very prolific writing activity;  indeed, section 5 aside, the eight sequences included are chronologically ordered and none is separated from the preceding sequence by a period greater than two years.  There is a further continuity, in that Alan reiterates his longstanding interest in writing sequences (‘unfinished and unfinishable business’) in preference to (‘perfect’) individual poems.   While such continuities are engaging, and no doubt appreciated by most readers (myself included), they do remain perhaps a trifle transparent.  At the same time these “givens,” co-ordinates that guide our reading along the line of coherence and continuity, need not distract us from other ways in which the writing engages our attention.

By his taking account, I wish to suggest more the way in which Alan as poet has traversed the period of time the book represents or, more especially, what has moved or compelled him and how he has chosen to involve us in these traversing actions.  And the two extremes of the word “compelled” are not easily separable here:  there is as much a rightness about the texts as a naturalness, so that one feels the writer is making a way through as much as finding it.  The range of the poems alone suggests they do not all come simply from the same source.  Poems, according to this reading, are no longer inspired events but objects of intense attention and repayers of attention.

While there is quite a variation of approach in the writing, there is also a likeness in the contest that engages the poet.  The contest, as I term it, is in large part intuitive and concerns the place of language as mediation in a writing that enjoys and values its sense of relation with the world.  What, to put it plainly, is language’s use in regard to the self and any out there?  If there is a development in the writer’s dealing with language in the collection, it is away from a traditional referential model (language representing the self in relationship with external things), toward one in which language assumes a reflexive and inner alertness.  ‘Squeezing the Bones,’ the opening bittersweet elegiac sequence concerning the death of the poet’s father, belongs for me clearly to the former use of language.  Moving as it is, and beautifully written, in its celebration of language as instance of reconciliation, overcoming difference and estrangement, it continues to privilege poetic language as the means by which essential harmonies underpin apparent discords.  Such a privileging of language in poetry has been called increasingly into question in recent years, particularly by the American Language poets.  My own predilection is less for an emphasis on the transparency of language (i.e. as repository of essence and integrity) and more for a writing practice that recognises language in its own opacity, its physicality and intrinsic difference.

The difference of which I speak is perhaps easiest to pick in the shift in writing method that occurs between the two sequences in Missing Parts which have acknowledged pre-written sources, ‘a Great antiskorbutick’ (Section 2:  1977-78) and ‘Suma’ (Section 9:  1990).  In the former, compiled ‘from direct quotes from the Journals of Captain James Cook,’ a careful demarcation applies to the levels of language activity – between original events (historical records), the poet (whose role is selective not interpretive), and the reader (who accepts that the integrity of both remains intact).  In ‘Soma’, there is a greater breaking open of events (written or real), whereby historical and contemporary utterances are interspersed and are not always clearly delineated.  Much of the original feel of the pre-Socratics remains, but the integrity of the piece is not obtained there.  Whereas in ‘a Great antiskorbutick’ the voice and words are recognisably Cook’s, in ‘Soma’ there is a mix of ‘some direct and some not so direct quotes and workings from the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers.’  What constitutes accuracy and truth has moved, is movable.  The voices we hear are as much Alan’s as the assorted (unnamed) pre-Socratics;  there are even some pleasant idiomatic touches, like ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ and ‘dammit, half-measure!’

The importance of importance in poetry is over.   It is as if what continues to interest us as the purpose of poetry is the fact that it has possibilities of purpose, nothing more.  This may sound conceited or even pretty shallow, but that is not my view of it and not, I suggest, the position inclined toward in these sequences.  For purpose and importance have to do with alignment, hierarchy, power.  And if there’s presumption in making such a claim, it is not at the expense of much that has been achieved in Missing Parts.  The ‘Crystal fountain’ sequence is for me a special place to be.  Here the language is multi-positioned, non-intercessional.  Each poem in the sequence comprises a horizontal layer of discourse, like a cross-section, from several vertical discourses placed side by side.  Time and space are collapsed as the co-ordinates by which we recognise meaning and external reference.  While the normal consecutiveness of syntactical sense is broken down, the remnants of syntax remain.  Opposing senses sit side by side in a way that has opposites complement and not oppose or counteract each other:

                    he knows nothing that isn't known
                    better by someone else. A capital
                    on a grid & see what happens. Blue
                    jacket, red pants. Purists might
                    much with little. Unattended, the
                    chess table leaves it open. Death,
                    sure, but no chance of shattering.
                    A relatively small crystal lily
                    stops & starts. Two windows, five
                    neon tubes, 4 angles. Desperate
                    buying and selling

This is a wonderful poem, part of an exciting sequence.  It introduces a manner of writing that we may well hope to see developed further in Alan’s future work.

Much more could be said about the collection, but such things no doubt are well able to take care of themselves.  Those who admire Alan’s earlier work will have plenty to content themselves with here;  those, like myself, who look more to newer involvements, also need not feel disappointed.  Alan, in his characteristic pared down way, has not let much slip by that he would not wish to be represented by.  It is an opportune and welcome return.