Book Launch
Liam Guilar: Rough Spun to Close Weave
AAWP Conference: November 2012
One of the
misconceptions about poetry is that it is a kind of code. A reader needs to
know the code, such thinking goes, in order to extract the meaning from that
poem, just like one needs a nut-cracker to extract a nut from its shell. I must
admit to wondering if Liam may have been speaking in some kind of special
private code, aimed directly at me, in this book. I am an associate supervisor
for Liam’s creative PhD thesis which is a thesis made up of a creative
component and an exegesis. As such, I wondered if he was telling me something
in ‘Ghost Fences’ with this line: ‘This needs no exegesis’. Of course, such a
paranoid, narcissistic reading is as wrong-headed as the poetry-as-code idea
(which is also often underwritten by paranoia and narcissism).
Any
reading of a poem is in itself a kind of exegesis, since the creative play of
writing poetry is mirrored in the creative, interpretive act of reading poetry.
Two years ago I launched another book, at another AAWP conference: Kevin
Brophy’s Patterns of Creativity. In
that book we read that ‘Poetry, like
evolution, is an improvisational group event. And as with evolution, its nature
is change, its basis is in reproduction (imitation), and its method is blind’
(p. 90). No poet can entirely ignore the past. To be utterly original would
mean being unintelligible. But one cannot simply repeat the past. The tension
between repetition and innovation that we find in evolution is central to
poetic discourse, as Kevin suggested.
Kevin’s analogy is especially pertinent with
regard to the book I am launching here today. As in Liam’s other books of
poetry, Rough Spun to Close Weave is
a concentrated and highly original essay on the relationship between the
present and the past, on the evolution of poetry. It demonstrates repeatedly
that there is no vision without revision. Guilar’s strength lies in his bold
appropriations of earlier poetic traditions, in particular the Anglo-Saxon
tradition. Indeed, the book opens with an untitled prologue that reminds the
reader that ‘These words worked the long day Harold died, / when Norman French
swept up the slope of Senlac Hill / and English grammar broke and bled into the
dusk’.
As this suggests, Liam continues the great
modernist project of apprehending the continuities between the quotidian,
history, and myth. As part of this project, Rough
Spun to Close Weave matches the everyday with the elemental: lakes,
harbours, journeys, wars. A landscape becomes ‘Three bands of colour. Above the
endless / empty blueness of the sky, bleached by the sun. Between, the ragged
stripe of forest green. / Below, the blue-grey lake’. (‘Ghost Fences 2’).
The
continuity between the everyday and the elemental occupies a paradoxical place
amid a modernity that Liam shows up alternatively as abysmal, comic, or
disturbing. As ‘What I Learnt from Watching Television Archaeology’
illustrates, Liam relies on a wide variety of modes to chart his vision. These
include chronicles, modern history, television, fairy tales, ballads, travel
writing, and Arthurian romance.
Liam’s
poems are profoundly concerned with place: how we imagine it, how we move
through it, how it haunts us. This is most apparent in one of the book’s key
works, ‘Talking Nothing to the Stone’, a work that meditates on personal
memory, history, and myth as those things intersect in a particular place (in
this case, Coventry in England). In a poem about the dispersal of people,
memories, and stories, Liam notes that ‘It’s only exile if you have no
curiosity’.
This
is a book that is underwritten by an intense curiosity, and what is a poet if
not curious about the world? Liam likes to end his emails with the phrase ‘All
good things’. In signing off here, I suggest you read this book: it is full of
‘all good things’.
DAVID McCOOEY
