Poetry review – RAG ARGONAUTS : Naomi Foyle explores a new collection by Alan Morrison
Rag Argonauts
Alan Morrison
Caparison Press, 2024
ISBN 9781838496678
137pp £12
In Alan Morrison’s twelfth collection, the back cover tells us, ‘disparate and desperate characters’ including Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and a Stochastic Parrot (AI language model programme), ‘navigate passages through ragged waters as randomly gathered Rag Argonauts’. I found the blurb compelling, and the book did not disappoint.
A poet and publisher of epic endurance and achievement (his literary web journal The Recusant has nearly 3.9 million hits), over his substantial oeuvre, Morrison has developed his own distinctive form, the ‘verse essay’: long discursive meditations on historical and political themes, musically taut, plumbing lyrical depths, but variously polemical, argumentative, or scholarly in tone; often, in intertextual bricolage, including substantial quotations. Here, he uses the propulsive form to parse the fascinating lives and careers of his ‘Rag Argonauts’ like long curling fruit peels: mottled in tone, these poems read as if cut and flourished in one skilful gesture, often in very long sentences. The literary and biographical details of ‘Young Auden’, for example, unscroll in the critical context of The Age of Anxiety, as the ‘Brummie’ ‘brilliant boy’ had it. Morrison elucidates:
Neurosis, a residue sourced from a species’
Rinsing sin, the ‘dizzyness of freedom’, Chagrin
Of Choice, the choking chain of impossible
Office, or whichever Kierkegaardian
Coinage one picked, Anxiety was the defining
Temperament of the time – in tandem with
Ennui …
Beneath the jaunty irony, with its anti-cigarette ad alliteration, the imagery resonates with the book’s more personal and affective themes. In a powerful narrative sequence structuring the first section of the book, Morrison explores the psyche of a nerve-wracked working-class poet in the Age of Austerity. The speaker or persona presented in these poems grows up in often abject poverty, suffering intrusive thoughts and social isolation; whether in the neighbourhood, at school, on working holiday in France, eternally labouring under an extreme sense of being ‘misplaced in purgatorial triage’. Later he fulfils his father’s thwarted academic ambitions, changing his posture and accent at university, only to find ‘one cannot escape / from one’s own head’. The sequence is shot through with moving descriptions of anxiety, OCD, depression, book hoarding, medication and concomitant economic hardship.
In ‘The Four Spoons of Phineus’, a man torturously attempts ‘to explain / the impetus of Pure Obsessional Disorder’ in a Department for Works and Pensions Personal Independence Payment appeal. The title fuses a reference to an ill-fated character in the myth of the Argonauts – a blinded prophet plagued by Harpies – with a metaphor used by disabled people to describe their limited reserves of energy, here taking on Eliotian resonance. As the contemporary Phineus struggles to fit his language into the bureaucratic ‘form’ required, the four spoons become four circles of hell:
& so the appeal was refused, as Phineus felt
in his bones it would be—in spite of all the facts—
as he rose from the chair (without using its arms
for support as it was noted), staggering towards
the savage daylight of Havant gazing in against
the glass from outside the suitably Brutalist
tribunal building like an outraged vigilante
raging at a convicted child molester being
bundled into a van with a blanket over his face
that might as well be an inverted spit hood
(the kind of graphic imagery suggested in his
agitated head)—then there was a hailstorm,
traumatic, that clattered at the windows …
A late diagnosis of autism seems to pierce the mist of these various chronic mental conditions, only to bring its own melancholic struggles with what might have been, what is:
. . . an autumnal revelation
That illuminated just as it disoriented me
Moreso than I had already ever been ...
Unsurprisingly, given the mental distress documented here, suicide is also a theme of the book, explored through the lives of poets including the fictional ‘Parry Amphlett’, who picks up the Prufrockian theme with ‘tea-stained, grimed’ spoon and half-eaten browning banana (no peaches even dreamt of here, though Browning haunts this long, third-person narrative poem). Rag Argonauts is not, though, a monument to hopelessness, but a plangent work of symphonic scope, in which music, beauty, nature, compassion and spirituality provide a stirring counterpoint to the predominant themes of entrapment and despair. The clairvoyant Helena Blavatsky is a case in point:
Now and forever, over there, Blavatsky is
Enveloped in her vanity project of afterlives,
Violet Unveiled or Violet Observed, revealing
Itself through violet sleeves in violet tropes
On violet-scented notepaper from the violet-
Tinted afterlife, her will still holding out for
That which one of her apostles, W.B. Yeats,
Prefigured as the coming ‘greater renascence –
The revolt of the soul against the intellect’ –
O violet emanations, O violet vibrations,
O violet leitmotivs, O violet liquefactions! '
Prufrockian and violet imagery reemerge in the final poem, a highly readable ‘cut up’ of Matthew Hollis’s biography of The Waste Land, full of Modernist incident, with a forensic focus on class, place and Thomas and Valerie Eliot’s clashes of nerves.
The one flaw I noted in the collection was baffling to me: Morrison peculiarly skirts Auden’s queerness, describing his live-in relationship with Chester Kallman as platonic. Perhaps it eventually was, but it seems strange for a writer as politically radical and well-read as Morrison to have avoided or been unaware of the two men’s tempestuous romance. Possibly he was trying to suggest the silence that surrounded illegal same-sex relationships at the time – but at the cost of a missed opportunity to explore Auden’s love life with the melancholic empathy that is a hallmark of Morrison’s work.
As it is, love and nature offer their consolations in the collection: some tender shorter lyric and eco-poems shine from its pages. As do surprises. When Demosthenes pops up in a Bognor Regis pharmacy, anything can happen in a poetry collection! Rag Argonauts is an elegantly designed hardcover readers will doubtless return to for its critical contribution to Anglo-American literary history, as well as its moving contemporary down-at-heel portrait of the artist as a young (and not-so-young) man in long-broken Britain.
Aug 21 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Alan Morrison
Poetry review – RAG ARGONAUTS : Naomi Foyle explores a new collection by Alan Morrison
In Alan Morrison’s twelfth collection, the back cover tells us, ‘disparate and desperate characters’ including Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and a Stochastic Parrot (AI language model programme), ‘navigate passages through ragged waters as randomly gathered Rag Argonauts’. I found the blurb compelling, and the book did not disappoint.
A poet and publisher of epic endurance and achievement (his literary web journal The Recusant has nearly 3.9 million hits), over his substantial oeuvre, Morrison has developed his own distinctive form, the ‘verse essay’: long discursive meditations on historical and political themes, musically taut, plumbing lyrical depths, but variously polemical, argumentative, or scholarly in tone; often, in intertextual bricolage, including substantial quotations. Here, he uses the propulsive form to parse the fascinating lives and careers of his ‘Rag Argonauts’ like long curling fruit peels: mottled in tone, these poems read as if cut and flourished in one skilful gesture, often in very long sentences. The literary and biographical details of ‘Young Auden’, for example, unscroll in the critical context of The Age of Anxiety, as the ‘Brummie’ ‘brilliant boy’ had it. Morrison elucidates:
Neurosis, a residue sourced from a species’ Rinsing sin, the ‘dizzyness of freedom’, Chagrin Of Choice, the choking chain of impossible Office, or whichever Kierkegaardian Coinage one picked, Anxiety was the defining Temperament of the time – in tandem with Ennui …Beneath the jaunty irony, with its anti-cigarette ad alliteration, the imagery resonates with the book’s more personal and affective themes. In a powerful narrative sequence structuring the first section of the book, Morrison explores the psyche of a nerve-wracked working-class poet in the Age of Austerity. The speaker or persona presented in these poems grows up in often abject poverty, suffering intrusive thoughts and social isolation; whether in the neighbourhood, at school, on working holiday in France, eternally labouring under an extreme sense of being ‘misplaced in purgatorial triage’. Later he fulfils his father’s thwarted academic ambitions, changing his posture and accent at university, only to find ‘one cannot escape / from one’s own head’. The sequence is shot through with moving descriptions of anxiety, OCD, depression, book hoarding, medication and concomitant economic hardship.
In ‘The Four Spoons of Phineus’, a man torturously attempts ‘to explain / the impetus of Pure Obsessional Disorder’ in a Department for Works and Pensions Personal Independence Payment appeal. The title fuses a reference to an ill-fated character in the myth of the Argonauts – a blinded prophet plagued by Harpies – with a metaphor used by disabled people to describe their limited reserves of energy, here taking on Eliotian resonance. As the contemporary Phineus struggles to fit his language into the bureaucratic ‘form’ required, the four spoons become four circles of hell:
A late diagnosis of autism seems to pierce the mist of these various chronic mental conditions, only to bring its own melancholic struggles with what might have been, what is:
Unsurprisingly, given the mental distress documented here, suicide is also a theme of the book, explored through the lives of poets including the fictional ‘Parry Amphlett’, who picks up the Prufrockian theme with ‘tea-stained, grimed’ spoon and half-eaten browning banana (no peaches even dreamt of here, though Browning haunts this long, third-person narrative poem). Rag Argonauts is not, though, a monument to hopelessness, but a plangent work of symphonic scope, in which music, beauty, nature, compassion and spirituality provide a stirring counterpoint to the predominant themes of entrapment and despair. The clairvoyant Helena Blavatsky is a case in point:
Prufrockian and violet imagery reemerge in the final poem, a highly readable ‘cut up’ of Matthew Hollis’s biography of The Waste Land, full of Modernist incident, with a forensic focus on class, place and Thomas and Valerie Eliot’s clashes of nerves.
The one flaw I noted in the collection was baffling to me: Morrison peculiarly skirts Auden’s queerness, describing his live-in relationship with Chester Kallman as platonic. Perhaps it eventually was, but it seems strange for a writer as politically radical and well-read as Morrison to have avoided or been unaware of the two men’s tempestuous romance. Possibly he was trying to suggest the silence that surrounded illegal same-sex relationships at the time – but at the cost of a missed opportunity to explore Auden’s love life with the melancholic empathy that is a hallmark of Morrison’s work.
As it is, love and nature offer their consolations in the collection: some tender shorter lyric and eco-poems shine from its pages. As do surprises. When Demosthenes pops up in a Bognor Regis pharmacy, anything can happen in a poetry collection! Rag Argonauts is an elegantly designed hardcover readers will doubtless return to for its critical contribution to Anglo-American literary history, as well as its moving contemporary down-at-heel portrait of the artist as a young (and not-so-young) man in long-broken Britain.