London Grip Poetry Review – Vaughan Pilikian

 

Poetry review – TIERCE: Rosie Johnston finds that Vaughan Pilikian’s poetry leaves room for the reader’s own speculations

 

Tierce
Vaughan Pilikian
Mica Press (2024)
ISBN 978-1-869848-3-47
104pp   £10.00

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Like Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, Tierce is a little word that can carry a surprising amount. It comes from tertius, Latin for third, and means (this book’s cover tells us) ‘a feint, a parry, a counterstrike, a set of organ stops, a band of desperadoes, a measure of provision, a hand from a marked deck, a major chord in a minor key, the surface of a shield divided in three’.

Vaughan Pilikian has a full profile too with translations of two volumes of Book Seven of Clay Sanskrit’s Mahabharata in the late noughties and three previous collections of poetry. At Eclipse, 2001 and Lyrics, 2009 are both published by Unruowe Books and Book of Days by Mica Press in 2018. Born in London in 1974 of an American mother and an Armenian father, he is trained in several classical languages, fine art and film making and is also a sculptor, designer, performance artist and screenwriter, currently teaching languages of the ancient Near East at City Lit. With such a spread of activities packed into one life, it is a surprise to find stillness and such economic beauty in his poems and a sense of trying to ‘open a way /on the tangled /wormwood /path’ (“Earthrise, Book of Days”).

His collections are less about the individual poems, more of a woven fabric of many threads that swings around the reader in rhythms close to song, always in simple language, about the search for safety, for a place to find and hold on to love. Some of the best poems address depression and the struggle for positivity. This is from “O stupor”:

O stupor, 
and the deep deep fall. 
O silence of days. 
O cruelty of waking. 

Yet this poem of three short stanzas ends:

In the end the fire
must consume itself:
in the end the blackened heart
must rise. 

Life’s universal insolubles keep snarling up the poet’s quest for meaning. In “That was your life”, having reflected on ‘Illusion that there is illusion’, the poem closes:

Perhaps you gather
a handful of fragments
sharp in your fingers
that glint with a thing unnamed. 

Perhaps you lose them 
on your mapless journey
and start all over again.

Pilikian is the son of at least two cultures and a sense of generational trauma is inevitable:

Exile
into which I was born. 
My long long flight out of
what I knew,
what I did not know.
Uncrowned all
my strange starry dreams:
I am still stunned and dazzled
by the whirl 
of sun to storm.
(I belong nowhere)

The poet feels his exiled, earlier generations with him, especially their sense of keeping on the move, climbing, yearning always for what they have lost and may never find:

The lost is lost within us,
the lost lost inside,
and the lost are lost in our past receding. 
Can we find them again
on the winding path? …

Leaves upon leaves, falling and fallen, 
leaves of our dreams,
a hundred thousand histories
cast wide to the wind.

With such spare poems, our imaginations can fill the empty space around them in our different ways. Some feel to me like prayers, others like personal love poems or laments about depression and lostness, sometimes all three at once. My interpretation today may not be tomorrow’s and may be miles from what the poet intended. Is “Life, life” about depression again, for example? Or is it conversation between Pilikian and his god?

I knew you once.
I will find my way back to you
before you cast me out forever
into the dark
from which I have come.

As the collection approaches its close, the poems seem to tease us with an answer:

This is the secret 
you were never told: 
everything carries you out of yourself
and drives you back inside …

nothing will be as you feared it would be,
nothing will be
as you dreamt it might.
And all the questions you raised
as a child
to the starry sky
will fall again upon you
like flakes of unearthly snow
one by one:
each intact, exquisite, unanswered. 

Is the secret that there are no answers at all? Was Don Maclean right in Wonderful Baby to say that as long as we live, we’ll never find out? Then, in the final pages of Tierce, some tiny poems appear, of three short-line quadruplets. The best is the final one, “How few the days”. The first stanza has the resonance of Pound’s And The Days Are Not Full Enough, and the final two stanzas seem to move into prayer. Could this be a kind of tierce de Picardie?

How few the days,
how brief the hours,
how little remains
yet to be.

O poverty take
these things from my hands,
tear them away,
set me free:

That I might craft 
with nothing, 
that nothing
might craft with me. 

A tierce de Picardie, or Picardy third, is a musical technique beloved of composers from JS Bach to Vaughan Williams (and reversed by Cole Porter) where our hearts can be melted when a piece that has been in a minor key throughout, is closed by a triad chord or series of chords in a major key. Across the world, a musical move from minor to major can feel like sunshine or an end to drought, that life is worthwhile after all. Does Pilikian mean his final poem to be a major-key, triad chord that brings his poignant collection home to a happy ending? He leaves that to us to decide.

Rosie Johnston’s fifth poetry book has been accepted by Mica Press for publication in spring 2025. Lapwing Publications published her first four books, most recently Six-Count Jive in 2019. Her poetry is anthologised by Live Canon, Arlen House, OneWorld’s Places of Poetry anthology, Fevers of the Mind and American Writers Review. She read her poetry most recently at In-Words in Greenwich and the Faversham Literary Festival. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com