So I’ve already moaned about the pre-publicity
for The Sunlit Zone, by Lisa Jacobson. Three meaningless statements, which have
now morphed into the blurb on the back cover and seem to suggest the publisher
is not interested in attracting anyone’s attention to this book, which is a pity.
To sum up the blurb, The Sunlit Zone is apparently “A risk taking
novel in verse with pure poetry in which romance joins hands with science and
takes to the water.”
But “novel in verse” implies a narrative,
and the minimum information a prospective buyer might want would be characters,
plot and setting. Imagine putting The Da Vinci Code, The Brothers Karamazov and The
Story of O down on the table and saying: “three novels in prose, and that’s
all the information you need, so pick one.”
A first person female narrator relates her
autobiography, alternating between Present tense (2050/51) and her past
(literally from the act of her conception in 2020 . Ab Ovo in deed). In
doing so she comes to terms with her twin sister’s death, her awkward relationships
with her friends and family, the ghostly boyfriend who returns, and after the
father’s death and her mother’s art exhibition, finds happiness and, if not love, then satisfying sex with the no longer ghostly
boyfriend. Coherence is primarily
the fictional narrator’s autobiography.
It’s set in a faintly dystopian future
Australia with many technical widgets and gadgets and cloned whales and other mutant
sea creatures.
There’s nothing here that wouldn’t attract
the average reader of modern prose. The publishers could have put tongue firmly
in cheek and promoted it as Sci-Fi Chick-Lit (although that would have been unfair).
It feels like a softer version of
some of the stories Ellison was publishing in the Dangerous Visions series, or
Ursula Le Guin’s writing for adults. Or, stripped of the SF trappings and closer
to home, like Stephen Herrick’s ‘A
place like this’.
There’s nothing here in the poetry either
to alienate a prose reader. No Post Modern Avant-Garde experimental Language games.
(This is neither criticism nor praise, just a comment) The story is told in a series of
tightly controlled stanzas, almost all of which are end stopped. The result is that the text mimics a
rhythmically organised speaking voice, though the formal quality of the stanza shifts the voice away
from the impression of a natural speaker which can sometimes be produced in
good first person prose. The sections alternate between the now of telling and past
phases of the narrator’s life.
Although lacking the pace of The Monkeys’ Mask or the technical virtuosity of ‘Freddy
Neptune’, the rhythmic control keeps the story moving. Whether or not it’s “Pure poetry”
depends on your definition of that vacuous term. As Clare Kinney pointed out, narrative poetry has to
negotiate two binaries: Narrative/Poetry and Narrative/Lyric. Modern readers
(and critics) tend to assume narrative will be in prose. ‘The Sunlit Zone” doesn’t dissolve the
binaries but tends to sit firmly on the narrative side of both of them. Pace is perhaps won at the cost of the
absence of the kind of image or
phrase that might make a reader pause and reread it. Whether that means the
book won’t reward rereading is no more an issue than it is with any other
narrative.
Is it risk taking? Perhaps it is, though if it is, it’s a sad comment on modern
poetry. By narrating them; sex,
birth, death, loss, family, develop contexts. The narrative returns the human
subject and human concerns to poems in a way lyric poems on these subjects
don’t. It also takes the obvious
narrative risk. Just as with any novel, if a reader doesn’t like the
characters, or the plot, or the setting, he or she will stop reading.
But this book should attract a much larger
readership than it is probably going to. It could escape the narrow confines of
Poetry World and find a wider range of readers than the usual buyers of poetry books.
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