Shanta Acharya finds that Mark Ableyâs New & Selected is a fitting testimony to his poetic vision and skill
The Tongues of Earth â New and Selected Poems
Mark Abley
Coteau Books, Canada.
ISBN: 978-1-55050-611-5 (pbk); ISBN: 978-1-55050-611-2 (pdf)
119 pp $16.95
Mark Abley is a Canadian poet, journalist, editor and non-fiction writer. He was born in Warwickshire, England, and moved to Alberta as a child with his parents. Since 1983 he has lived in Montreal with his family. Abley won a Rhodes scholarship from the University of Saskatchewan (1978), received the Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in England (1981), the Fiona Mee Prize for Literary Journalism in Canada (1983, Canadaâs National Newspaper Award for critical writing), and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship for research into language change. He has not only been a contributing editor of Macleanâs and Saturday Night magazines, but worked for sixteen years as a feature writer and book-review editor at the Montreal Gazette. In addition, he was a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His publications include three collections of poetry, two childrenâs books and several award-winning works of non-fiction.
The Tongues of Earth brings together a selection of poems from his three previous collections, Blue Sand, Blue Moon (1988), Glasburyon (1994) and The Silver Palace Restaurant (2005) â all short-listed for the Quebec Writersâ Federation poetry prize â, along with several new poems. As Abley points out, âmany of the poems, especially the earlier ones, have undergone significant changes since their first appearanceâ. The poems are arranged in four parts, each section with its internal cohesion and belonging, yet resonating with poems in other sections. With his international and humane perspective, his work ranging in setting from Ireland to Ethiopia, Tibet to Turkey, these poems are excursions into time and place, transporting us into neglected, forgotten corners of the world, not merely to educate us, but to provide us with evidence of having been moved and enlightened by contact with otherness, âto penetrate the inmost spiritsâ, to be aware of our shared humanity, our strength and limitation.
At ease with both traditional and postmodern forms, he writes about intimacy, parenthood, growing-up, death and loss, language, nature with a deep understanding of the human condition. In âMother and Sonâ, the intensity of the relationship is expressed in almost Biblical terms:
I am the word made flesh. You
are all memory; I am
all forgetting, all struggling to forget.
In âExpecting,â addressed to his daughter, Abley asks:
So, Megan, what did you anticipate
heading down the channel to a rim of fire,
a crowning and the arduous strait
when your formidable shoulders bore
down through your motherâs pain, her torn flesh?
The challenge of parenthood is deftly described, watching her
peer our way
with your remote, silver-blue eyes
as though youâd travelled from a shadow planet
expecting us to know your cries.
âInto the Woodsâ, dedicated to his daughter Kayden, speaks of a magical place, away from the cityâs racket, where one could imagine
Sleeping
Beautyâs ruined palace, just as the hefty vine
above the water
would be Tarzanâs if heâd left Jane in the jungle,
appeared in Pointe Claire and befriended a weak-lunged,
tenacious, book-loving child who had to battle
too hard to grow up.
While most of his poems arise from personal experience, the ones about his family are deeply moving. âAgainâ is a deceptively powerful love poem that begins with a simple, almost mundane, statement: âWaking for no good reason after/ we have made loveâŠâ Along with the poet, we discover
the silent room
smells different, as if our slow
unexpected passion had transformed
a homeâŠ
The poem builds up as the relationship defines itself, moving from âwe have made love for the first time/ in far too long,â to passion transforming a home. The subsequent image of âa fat, orange, white-rimmed candle/ still burning, hours laterâŠâ symbolises a relationship that has been burning for years. Yet it is âa fire your dreaming has no need for,â denoting a love that is true, assured. The poem spells out the nature of love in one compact sentence, ending with a powerfully apt ending, the single, thrusting syllables of the last line:
I climb from the sheets and blow it out,
draft of night against my drowsy body;
thatâs when you shudder half-
awake, stretching an arm to clutch me;
and I want you, I want you again.
Ableyâs range is impressive â from personal lyrics, meditations (âAsian Massâ) and reflections on the endangered and extinct (âA Labrador Duckâ, âGlasburyonâ) to a poem (âGoodsoilâ) consisting entirely of Saskatchewan place names. In âDeep Goldâ, we encounter, via the letters and journals of Samuel Palmer, various insights into states of the soul that are Blakean: âI / Believe this realm to be the veil of Heaven, / The setting of our table for a feast: A dream of eternity, the antepast.â With a shock of recognition we recognise that âAt thirty the illusions drop away.â How âWe are green first, then grey; / And then weâre nothing in this worldâŠâ These are the kind of âstories we recite to ease our pain⊠Determining the lie of heavenâ. (âParadiseâ)
The tragic, unpredictable, transitory aspect of life is captured deftly in âThe Nextâ where âOne day you need to show ridiculous courage and you do; / the next, the same; the next, the same. / One day youâre in what people call mid-life.â It brings to mind one of Ableyâs best poems, which appears later in the collection, âThe Not Quite Greatâ. This poem needs no elucidation, it is a powerful statement of what is means to be human:
The Not Quite Great
I think continually of those who are not quite great,
whose duties demand as much as they can give,
are in two minds, or lack the sudden courage
to shatter obligation like an egg.
Under the sun they hurry away from the sun,
knowing that in the shade a hundred tasks await them;
conscious, too, of the daily price
of poverty or laughing children or a friend
in pain. To them the small hours do not bring
a double orgasm and rumâs oblivion
but a drenched diaper or an old, racked hand
they clutch and murmur to while looking through
a gap in the discreet curtains at the night.
Given a choice, they might not even want
a second chance at the careless life
but imagine it with a tense nostalgia, as though
the essential delight of their blood
were disintegrating under pressure into
shards of memory that scratch the heart.
Abley touches down in various sites â physical, mental and spiritual â of loss (perhaps of hope if we can muster the will to change), taking stock of social conditions, the harsh realities of our world as much as our own growing self-realisation. He writes about events that lead us to evaluate the past. In âA View of Delftâ, from the title one might be forgiven for thinking of the beauty of the place, of Vermeer and his art, until one reads the epigraph from Christopher Wrightâs Vermeer: ââŠa special place not in his own time, when he was ignored, but outside it. Vermeer has taken his place in the history of the taste of the last hundred years, and from the strictly historical point of view he should hardly be mentionedâ. The poem begins with how âthe town blew up in 1654â when
a powder magazine
exploded without warning, for secret reasons
perhaps a function of recent war
or a prospect of the one to come.
Vermeer and his wife survived, she in the market buying cheese and he in a garret examining a Spanish painting. Later we learn, âThat evening/ a girl he knew in one of those houses, /âŠ/ gave birth to an eyeless, / armless boy, dying in a puddle/ of her own dark blood.â
The poem prepares us for the next, âFireâ, whose epigraph reminds us of the horror and destruction inflicted on a nation on the orders of of Gen. Curtis LeMay, who implemented a massive fire bombing campaign against cities in Japan, killing more people in Tokyo on the night of May 9-10, 1945, than âwent up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasakiâ. The tragedy is evoked sixty years later as âa Tokyo sky mutates into trembling / scrolls and screens, a calligraphy of fire.â When the poet walks past an older man he wants to ask how he managed to live âwhen the sky delivered fireâ⊠âfrying infants on their motherâs backs, / boiling children alive in the canals, killing / a hundred thousand people in one nightâ. But he doesnât âspeak his tongue; and the old man is beaming.â It is the image of the beaming face of an old man that stays with us, a redeeming feature of being human.
âWhatâs true to life, I guess,/ is how everyone suffers.â Abley reminds us in âAfter Pinocchioâ. While âthe poetry of earth/ is made of deathâ, Ableyâs work engages us with his insights charged with the emotional power of poetic language. âFlightâ begins with âthe free sky aboveâ where âa song is fluttering, taking/ wing, hunting for breath,â a âmelody lost in/ a thousand languages and/ found and lost again,â where âthe songs are waiting/ for earth to shape them.â For someone as gifted and incisive in his observation, reading Ableyâs poetry enriches our understanding of the world:
this cornucopia
a silent archive a gallery of desire
its beloved images feared, worshipped, slaughtered
fallen out of mind driven beyond memory
unbreathing and unmoving
but for the horses
still whinnying now
and the blood-coloured handprints
(Chauvet)
The Tongues of Earth is a book about life, love, language, travel, the devastation of our planet and more. Ableyâs concerns about language feature as much in his poems as his other writings. For his studies of language Abley has been called an âinquisitive, bemused Everyman,â leading readers on a lively intellectual journey through uncharted territory. With The Tongues of Earth, he continues this path, this time to the clarity and grace, high intelligence and deep feeling of poetry. His concern for language and nature merge in âGarefowlâ where âthe word enfolds the bird.â In âKâtunaxaâ, a language formerly known as Kootenai, now severely endangered, âa conversation of ravensâ echoes off the scree like âverbs in a language without relatives, / a relic on a ripped map, / mouths that possesses a word for âstarving/ though having a fish trap.â â
Abley records for posterity his lament for a disappearing world â for the forgotten, overlooked, endangered and extinct. His poems essentially describe the Fall. Imagining paradise lost is not mere nostalgia, more a warning of losses to come â unless we do something about it. If the job of the poet is to help us see familiar things with a fresh perspective, see the world, emphathise with its immense beauty and possibility, helping us to understand ourselves, then Ableyâs songs linger in us, ringing thus in memory:
Each time we lose a language,
the ghosts who made use of it
cast a new bell.
The voices magnify. Soon,
listen, theyâll outpeal
the tongues of earth.
Each time we lose a language we lose a way of living, a new way of seeing the world. This loss is more profound than we can imagine â this slow narrowing, limiting of our vision. And, like all major works of art, The Tongues of Earth reveals its secrets when read again.
.
.
An internationally published poet, critic, reviewer and scholar, Shanta Acharya is the author of ten books. Her New and Selected Poems is to be published by HarperCollins (India) in January 2017. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, her work has been featured in major publications, including Poetry Review, PN Review, The Spectator, The Guardian Poem of the Week, Edinburgh Review, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Asia Literary Review, The Little Magazine, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. Founder of âPoetry in the Houseâ, she was responsible for hosting monthly readings at Lauderdale House, in London, from 1996-2015. Shanta has twice served on the board of trustees of The Poetry Society, UK. www.shantaacharya.com
by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2016 • Tags: books, poetry, Shanta Acharya • 0 Comments
Shanta Acharya finds that Mark Ableyâs New & Selected is a fitting testimony to his poetic vision and skill
Mark Abley is a Canadian poet, journalist, editor and non-fiction writer. He was born in Warwickshire, England, and moved to Alberta as a child with his parents. Since 1983 he has lived in Montreal with his family. Abley won a Rhodes scholarship from the University of Saskatchewan (1978), received the Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in England (1981), the Fiona Mee Prize for Literary Journalism in Canada (1983, Canadaâs National Newspaper Award for critical writing), and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship for research into language change. He has not only been a contributing editor of Macleanâs and Saturday Night magazines, but worked for sixteen years as a feature writer and book-review editor at the Montreal Gazette. In addition, he was a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His publications include three collections of poetry, two childrenâs books and several award-winning works of non-fiction.
The Tongues of Earth brings together a selection of poems from his three previous collections, Blue Sand, Blue Moon (1988), Glasburyon (1994) and The Silver Palace Restaurant (2005) â all short-listed for the Quebec Writersâ Federation poetry prize â, along with several new poems. As Abley points out, âmany of the poems, especially the earlier ones, have undergone significant changes since their first appearanceâ. The poems are arranged in four parts, each section with its internal cohesion and belonging, yet resonating with poems in other sections. With his international and humane perspective, his work ranging in setting from Ireland to Ethiopia, Tibet to Turkey, these poems are excursions into time and place, transporting us into neglected, forgotten corners of the world, not merely to educate us, but to provide us with evidence of having been moved and enlightened by contact with otherness, âto penetrate the inmost spiritsâ, to be aware of our shared humanity, our strength and limitation.
At ease with both traditional and postmodern forms, he writes about intimacy, parenthood, growing-up, death and loss, language, nature with a deep understanding of the human condition. In âMother and Sonâ, the intensity of the relationship is expressed in almost Biblical terms:
In âExpecting,â addressed to his daughter, Abley asks:
The challenge of parenthood is deftly described, watching her
âInto the Woodsâ, dedicated to his daughter Kayden, speaks of a magical place, away from the cityâs racket, where one could imagine
While most of his poems arise from personal experience, the ones about his family are deeply moving. âAgainâ is a deceptively powerful love poem that begins with a simple, almost mundane, statement: âWaking for no good reason after/ we have made loveâŠâ Along with the poet, we discover
The poem builds up as the relationship defines itself, moving from âwe have made love for the first time/ in far too long,â to passion transforming a home. The subsequent image of âa fat, orange, white-rimmed candle/ still burning, hours laterâŠâ symbolises a relationship that has been burning for years. Yet it is âa fire your dreaming has no need for,â denoting a love that is true, assured. The poem spells out the nature of love in one compact sentence, ending with a powerfully apt ending, the single, thrusting syllables of the last line:
Ableyâs range is impressive â from personal lyrics, meditations (âAsian Massâ) and reflections on the endangered and extinct (âA Labrador Duckâ, âGlasburyonâ) to a poem (âGoodsoilâ) consisting entirely of Saskatchewan place names. In âDeep Goldâ, we encounter, via the letters and journals of Samuel Palmer, various insights into states of the soul that are Blakean: âI / Believe this realm to be the veil of Heaven, / The setting of our table for a feast: A dream of eternity, the antepast.â With a shock of recognition we recognise that âAt thirty the illusions drop away.â How âWe are green first, then grey; / And then weâre nothing in this worldâŠâ These are the kind of âstories we recite to ease our pain⊠Determining the lie of heavenâ. (âParadiseâ)
The tragic, unpredictable, transitory aspect of life is captured deftly in âThe Nextâ where âOne day you need to show ridiculous courage and you do; / the next, the same; the next, the same. / One day youâre in what people call mid-life.â It brings to mind one of Ableyâs best poems, which appears later in the collection, âThe Not Quite Greatâ. This poem needs no elucidation, it is a powerful statement of what is means to be human:
Abley touches down in various sites â physical, mental and spiritual â of loss (perhaps of hope if we can muster the will to change), taking stock of social conditions, the harsh realities of our world as much as our own growing self-realisation. He writes about events that lead us to evaluate the past. In âA View of Delftâ, from the title one might be forgiven for thinking of the beauty of the place, of Vermeer and his art, until one reads the epigraph from Christopher Wrightâs Vermeer: ââŠa special place not in his own time, when he was ignored, but outside it. Vermeer has taken his place in the history of the taste of the last hundred years, and from the strictly historical point of view he should hardly be mentionedâ. The poem begins with how âthe town blew up in 1654â when
Vermeer and his wife survived, she in the market buying cheese and he in a garret examining a Spanish painting. Later we learn, âThat evening/ a girl he knew in one of those houses, /âŠ/ gave birth to an eyeless, / armless boy, dying in a puddle/ of her own dark blood.â
The poem prepares us for the next, âFireâ, whose epigraph reminds us of the horror and destruction inflicted on a nation on the orders of of Gen. Curtis LeMay, who implemented a massive fire bombing campaign against cities in Japan, killing more people in Tokyo on the night of May 9-10, 1945, than âwent up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasakiâ. The tragedy is evoked sixty years later as âa Tokyo sky mutates into trembling / scrolls and screens, a calligraphy of fire.â When the poet walks past an older man he wants to ask how he managed to live âwhen the sky delivered fireâ⊠âfrying infants on their motherâs backs, / boiling children alive in the canals, killing / a hundred thousand people in one nightâ. But he doesnât âspeak his tongue; and the old man is beaming.â It is the image of the beaming face of an old man that stays with us, a redeeming feature of being human.
âWhatâs true to life, I guess,/ is how everyone suffers.â Abley reminds us in âAfter Pinocchioâ. While âthe poetry of earth/ is made of deathâ, Ableyâs work engages us with his insights charged with the emotional power of poetic language. âFlightâ begins with âthe free sky aboveâ where âa song is fluttering, taking/ wing, hunting for breath,â a âmelody lost in/ a thousand languages and/ found and lost again,â where âthe songs are waiting/ for earth to shape them.â For someone as gifted and incisive in his observation, reading Ableyâs poetry enriches our understanding of the world:
The Tongues of Earth is a book about life, love, language, travel, the devastation of our planet and more. Ableyâs concerns about language feature as much in his poems as his other writings. For his studies of language Abley has been called an âinquisitive, bemused Everyman,â leading readers on a lively intellectual journey through uncharted territory. With The Tongues of Earth, he continues this path, this time to the clarity and grace, high intelligence and deep feeling of poetry. His concern for language and nature merge in âGarefowlâ where âthe word enfolds the bird.â In âKâtunaxaâ, a language formerly known as Kootenai, now severely endangered, âa conversation of ravensâ echoes off the scree like âverbs in a language without relatives, / a relic on a ripped map, / mouths that possesses a word for âstarving/ though having a fish trap.â â
Abley records for posterity his lament for a disappearing world â for the forgotten, overlooked, endangered and extinct. His poems essentially describe the Fall. Imagining paradise lost is not mere nostalgia, more a warning of losses to come â unless we do something about it. If the job of the poet is to help us see familiar things with a fresh perspective, see the world, emphathise with its immense beauty and possibility, helping us to understand ourselves, then Ableyâs songs linger in us, ringing thus in memory:
Each time we lose a language we lose a way of living, a new way of seeing the world. This loss is more profound than we can imagine â this slow narrowing, limiting of our vision. And, like all major works of art, The Tongues of Earth reveals its secrets when read again.
.
.
An internationally published poet, critic, reviewer and scholar, Shanta Acharya is the author of ten books. Her New and Selected Poems is to be published by HarperCollins (India) in January 2017. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, her work has been featured in major publications, including Poetry Review, PN Review, The Spectator, The Guardian Poem of the Week, Edinburgh Review, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Asia Literary Review, The Little Magazine, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. Founder of âPoetry in the Houseâ, she was responsible for hosting monthly readings at Lauderdale House, in London, from 1996-2015. Shanta has twice served on the board of trustees of The Poetry Society, UK. www.shantaacharya.com