WALTER PERRIE: CARAVANSERAI Chanticleer Press 6/1 Jamaica Mews Edinburgh EH3 6HN UK £3 Web design by This page last updated: 11th December 2007. |
WALTER PERRIE: CARAVANSERAI | |
A slender selection of poems, some quite short and/or free-standing and others, in three cases, forming sequences on particular themes. In FILM CLIP — LITHUANIA 1942 Walter Perrie explores old flickering film-clips of war scenes, in particular the incongruous juxtaposition of their horrific nature and the response elicited in us with the deadening realisation that, through the passage of so much intervening time, the soldiers are all dead anyway: another line of long-since dead shuffles into frame for its turn to be shot.The two themes of the poem, the politics of the killing, and the distanced reaction of the present to such scenes, are linked in the bitter conclusion on the human indifference that permits such atrocities: every cinematic death looks much the same.Perrie's work is quite intense stuff, whether describing a crazed oldish man in ADAM, or a tree-trunk freakishly acquiring the shape of Christ's head in HEAD OF CHRIST — BUDAPEST, or evoking the desolation and pillage of long-past conflict in BURNING DUNNING, JANUARY 1716. Here is a sample from ADAM: Stands in the graveyard hour on hour not minding east wind or the rain. Past fifty and his teeth half-gone his boy's heart sorrows to seizure.A long and ambitious sequence of poems, EPILOGUE FOR A NEW AGE, explores the theme of the First World War, memory and the demise of living history through the passage of time and the subsequent total annihilation of its victims and any memory of them. The poet records his own memories of his grandmother and through her, going back further, her memories of her brother subsequently killed in France, and his gift to her of a lock of his yellow hair: What else will endure? No-one living remembers his laugh.He enumerates the horrors of that time, and in particular the tragedy of the young men cut down before they could savour life: those never old enough to quarrel and twist through the trenches of time.The sequence ends with a description, as the poet leans on Bridgend parapet, of the sudden appearance of a multitude of bats and their just as sudden disappearance. He sees them as nightly messengers who flit between the living and the dead, the real and dream-like, who roost and fly from shelter, like names in memorial stoneThe inherent pessimism of Perrie's work and message is shown in another sequence, entitled DESERT NOTES, where at an oasis unsuspecting travellers wait out dry days and drier nights, weary with dicing and gossip waiting for the sky to break and how to hope while far below the caravanserai answering to moonless tides great silent seas in darkness ebb and wait for us to die.The image of the desert is used to express the futile sameness of life and its choices: You think from here you can go in any direction and arrive somewhere different. Different from where? It is not true. From here every direction, every Where is the same.The desolation of the desert is an image of man's sorry present state, but any glib belief in a fall from grace is itself dismissed in the poet's nihilistic vision of any purpose, good or origin man might think he had: Because I and Adam are a singular man because all women are Eve, we remember that, fleeing Paradise, we followed a river down, down through mountain, hill, savannah, plain until it steamed and vanished in this dried-up pan. Hopeless now to try to follow that river back to its source, a hole into Nothing.In another sequence, OVERWHELMED, there are a number of poems dealing with sexual desire and activity, as in YOUNG MAN IN A BAR: In a moment he sits up, pulling the hat off, smiles at his companion, shaking out glossy, shoulder-length black hair, his profile — not that I think to have him, but — quite beautiful; a Hellenistic cameo in pale carved ivory.This is a selection of unashamedly and unremittingly intense and uncompromising poems well worth perusing. | ||
Reviewer: Alan Hardy. |