Paul McLoughlin admires Andrew Santâs dexterous juggling with multiple concepts of gravity
Baffling Gravity
Andrew Sant
Shoestring Press, 2019 (in association with Puncher & Wattman, Australia)
ISBN 978-1-912524-16-7
ÂŁ10.00
This is a book that refers to gravity in its title, and in all three of its sub-section titles, and uses the word in eight of the first sectionâs seventeen poems (and in five others, making for fifteen appearances all told). We might be excused for supposing we were back in Newtonâs classroom, but Santâs gravity is polysemic and these several meanings are all here â and their contiguous semantic field is that of poetry. We are in no doubt about this from the first poem to the last. Take the collectionâs opening four lines, for example. They are from âThe Tilersâ, who, up on a roof, might, of course, fall and prove gravity to us immediately, once and for all. Itâs a gentle opening to a gentle opener:
Three of them, nailing down
a geometry of slate. Iâd be sorry
if they move on soon
to some other leaky London roof.
Apart from âgeometry of slateâ, the tone is conversational, but even so, because this is a collection that incorporates more than a fair amount of science, such locutions soon become part of the conversation. The tilers entertain themselves: âOne sings âBlue Suede Shoesâ. / I admire their footworkâ. There are brilliant little poetic coups like this to be found throughout this serious book. Here âa level nose for doomâ is something shared by all those on the ground who fear that were they on the roof they would fall off. For the tilers that âis never going to happenâ. In âMeteoriteâ, the âfalling starâ is news: âwithout doubt / suddenly a hot rockâ, something âspectacular / with lots to offer a full stopâ. And, we observe, lots to offer a poem without punctuation.
âThe Man Who Loves Useful Sportsâ (love being a form of attraction, and therefore of gravity) is interesting for all manner of reasons. First, itâs written in the third person though clearly the protagonist is as much Sant as any âIâ to be found elsewhere. Second, heâs no team player (he calls stumps, or the wicket they form part of, âwicketsâ while telling us he canât see the point of wasting afternoons on cricket), and Iâd say that, like Mark Twain, heâs just plain wrong if he supposes golf to be âa good walk ruinedâ. To make matters worse, the sports he does care for are shooting and yachting, so he is understandably quick to defend himself against the obvious objections (killing, and wealth, and social class). He does not approve of the âstrenuous butterfly strokeâ (even of watching it) but likes the breast-stroke because it allows him to keep his head above water so that he may compose âan agile, roving, maritime odeâ. All of this is good fun to set against any earnestness he fears may be elsewhere in the collection. But we know he still means what he says! His discomfort with sports is evident, too, in âThe Multicoloured Ball in Motionâ where he uses the intransitive form of the verb âkickâ, which is indicative here only of someone who doesnât play football. But this is all part of the appeal. I like the way the speaker simply assumes that âthose / in cars on the promenadeâ are watching him and his grandson kick a ball about on the beach, and the way he enlists the help of the prevailing weather to engage with notions of gravity in a poem where the ball becomes an âorbâ that resembles âa floating planetâ or a bobbing buoy without ever being anything other than âa common ballâ.
This opening sectionâs sub-title poem, âGravitational Pullâ, is an instructive guide to Santâs way with poems. Its first line (âGravity always proves itselfâ) is followed by obvious examples and an acknowledgement that possible hypothetical quantums of gravitational energy may be present that are âblind / to Einsteinâs theory, defiantâ. When we then read âBalls of unequal mass // itâs reported Galileo dropped / from the Tower of Pisa, a high // Renaissance demonstration, peaked / in a dead-heatâ, we might not be being told anything we didnât already know, but itâs marvellous poetry all the same. Can we let âpeaked / in a dead-heatâ go by without a nod of acknowledgement? The same might be said for âwhen gravity makes sediment impressiveâ and for any number of other examples throughout the collection. The point here is that, just as a recovered clichĂŠ restores life to what was dead, so too do lists and thematically-linked poems in the hands of a poet like Sant remind us of what can be done with them, especially in an age when they have become, to their detriment, creative-workshop fodder.
The second sectionâs âMood Pieceâ includes the phrase that gives the collection its title and provides another example of how the ordinary and quotidian can be transformed. Here it is a recently washed shirt that hangs on a clothes-line displaying when wet âforgotten weatherâ and turning when dry âgymnastic in the welcome breezeâ. In doing so, of course, it is baffling gravity. Look, âno handsâ. Baffling can mean both incomprehension and lessening, so it is unsurprising to find poems exhibiting one or other or both of these attributes. âSourceâ, for example, takes in the history of the Yarra River in Santâs Melbourne. Its first section concludes (where the river narrows) at Dights Falls: âAll the global water thatâs flowed since Dight / built his mill goes smoothly over his weir. // It was never intended to be, but is, soothing to hearâ. It is the very kind of accident poetry thrives on; baffling and baffling. In Part 3 the speaker discovers, as Hardyâs reddleman does the figure on the barrow at the beginning of The Return of the Native, a saxophonist high above the river, âthe source of his music restorative, liquid, breezy as cliffsâ. âShirtless, he shoneâ, weâre told, as if weâd seen what heâd shed earlier in âMood Pieceâ.
The third section contains âGravityâ (also the sectionâs sub-title), a poem that serves as a fitting representative of the polysemic approach already mentioned. It is an extraordinary poem that recalls childhood days with a friend and his family, an earthquake and the deaths of his friendâs mother and the friend himself. The mother âpaused as she leaned over / gravityâs small vortex in the kitchen sinkâ to patch up her son Sammyâs wounds when he fell from trees or âgashed his legsâ. The poem concludes:
Sammy had two younger siblings,
witnesses, and a cat. When
Sammyâs mum, out shopping, walked
smack into a glass door it split
her stomach open; down,
she gushed too much blood to live.
Sammy collapsed one day after school
from a heart attack.
His dad, in black and white,
had nothing much remarkable
to say into his microphone
when the sound was turned up.
The matter-of-factness of this poetic reportage is comparable to that of Robert Frostâs âOut, Out ââ. It is followed by the differently devastating âA Suicide Noteâ, in which the speaker returns after fifty intervening years to read the Proceedings of Inquest concerning his motherâs death when his voice had not yet broken and her parting note. Gravity, indeed.
London Grip Poetry Review – Andrew Sant
January 29, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2019 • Tags: books, Paul McLoughlin, poetry • 0 Comments
Paul McLoughlin admires Andrew Santâs dexterous juggling with multiple concepts of gravity
This is a book that refers to gravity in its title, and in all three of its sub-section titles, and uses the word in eight of the first sectionâs seventeen poems (and in five others, making for fifteen appearances all told). We might be excused for supposing we were back in Newtonâs classroom, but Santâs gravity is polysemic and these several meanings are all here â and their contiguous semantic field is that of poetry. We are in no doubt about this from the first poem to the last. Take the collectionâs opening four lines, for example. They are from âThe Tilersâ, who, up on a roof, might, of course, fall and prove gravity to us immediately, once and for all. Itâs a gentle opening to a gentle opener:
Apart from âgeometry of slateâ, the tone is conversational, but even so, because this is a collection that incorporates more than a fair amount of science, such locutions soon become part of the conversation. The tilers entertain themselves: âOne sings âBlue Suede Shoesâ. / I admire their footworkâ. There are brilliant little poetic coups like this to be found throughout this serious book. Here âa level nose for doomâ is something shared by all those on the ground who fear that were they on the roof they would fall off. For the tilers that âis never going to happenâ. In âMeteoriteâ, the âfalling starâ is news: âwithout doubt / suddenly a hot rockâ, something âspectacular / with lots to offer a full stopâ. And, we observe, lots to offer a poem without punctuation.
âThe Man Who Loves Useful Sportsâ (love being a form of attraction, and therefore of gravity) is interesting for all manner of reasons. First, itâs written in the third person though clearly the protagonist is as much Sant as any âIâ to be found elsewhere. Second, heâs no team player (he calls stumps, or the wicket they form part of, âwicketsâ while telling us he canât see the point of wasting afternoons on cricket), and Iâd say that, like Mark Twain, heâs just plain wrong if he supposes golf to be âa good walk ruinedâ. To make matters worse, the sports he does care for are shooting and yachting, so he is understandably quick to defend himself against the obvious objections (killing, and wealth, and social class). He does not approve of the âstrenuous butterfly strokeâ (even of watching it) but likes the breast-stroke because it allows him to keep his head above water so that he may compose âan agile, roving, maritime odeâ. All of this is good fun to set against any earnestness he fears may be elsewhere in the collection. But we know he still means what he says! His discomfort with sports is evident, too, in âThe Multicoloured Ball in Motionâ where he uses the intransitive form of the verb âkickâ, which is indicative here only of someone who doesnât play football. But this is all part of the appeal. I like the way the speaker simply assumes that âthose / in cars on the promenadeâ are watching him and his grandson kick a ball about on the beach, and the way he enlists the help of the prevailing weather to engage with notions of gravity in a poem where the ball becomes an âorbâ that resembles âa floating planetâ or a bobbing buoy without ever being anything other than âa common ballâ.
This opening sectionâs sub-title poem, âGravitational Pullâ, is an instructive guide to Santâs way with poems. Its first line (âGravity always proves itselfâ) is followed by obvious examples and an acknowledgement that possible hypothetical quantums of gravitational energy may be present that are âblind / to Einsteinâs theory, defiantâ. When we then read âBalls of unequal mass // itâs reported Galileo dropped / from the Tower of Pisa, a high // Renaissance demonstration, peaked / in a dead-heatâ, we might not be being told anything we didnât already know, but itâs marvellous poetry all the same. Can we let âpeaked / in a dead-heatâ go by without a nod of acknowledgement? The same might be said for âwhen gravity makes sediment impressiveâ and for any number of other examples throughout the collection. The point here is that, just as a recovered clichĂŠ restores life to what was dead, so too do lists and thematically-linked poems in the hands of a poet like Sant remind us of what can be done with them, especially in an age when they have become, to their detriment, creative-workshop fodder.
The second sectionâs âMood Pieceâ includes the phrase that gives the collection its title and provides another example of how the ordinary and quotidian can be transformed. Here it is a recently washed shirt that hangs on a clothes-line displaying when wet âforgotten weatherâ and turning when dry âgymnastic in the welcome breezeâ. In doing so, of course, it is baffling gravity. Look, âno handsâ. Baffling can mean both incomprehension and lessening, so it is unsurprising to find poems exhibiting one or other or both of these attributes. âSourceâ, for example, takes in the history of the Yarra River in Santâs Melbourne. Its first section concludes (where the river narrows) at Dights Falls: âAll the global water thatâs flowed since Dight / built his mill goes smoothly over his weir. // It was never intended to be, but is, soothing to hearâ. It is the very kind of accident poetry thrives on; baffling and baffling. In Part 3 the speaker discovers, as Hardyâs reddleman does the figure on the barrow at the beginning of The Return of the Native, a saxophonist high above the river, âthe source of his music restorative, liquid, breezy as cliffsâ. âShirtless, he shoneâ, weâre told, as if weâd seen what heâd shed earlier in âMood Pieceâ.
The third section contains âGravityâ (also the sectionâs sub-title), a poem that serves as a fitting representative of the polysemic approach already mentioned. It is an extraordinary poem that recalls childhood days with a friend and his family, an earthquake and the deaths of his friendâs mother and the friend himself. The mother âpaused as she leaned over / gravityâs small vortex in the kitchen sinkâ to patch up her son Sammyâs wounds when he fell from trees or âgashed his legsâ. The poem concludes:
The matter-of-factness of this poetic reportage is comparable to that of Robert Frostâs âOut, Out ââ. It is followed by the differently devastating âA Suicide Noteâ, in which the speaker returns after fifty intervening years to read the Proceedings of Inquest concerning his motherâs death when his voice had not yet broken and her parting note. Gravity, indeed.