‘Nightmarishly pleasurable’

At the beginning of July, in the New York Review of Books, there was a wonderful poem by Fernando Pessoa, the Lisbon poet who split himself into four different poets; three pseudonyms and his own name (which has an air of anonymity about it, Pessoa meaning ‘Person’ in Portuguese). This poem was in the voice of Alvaro de Campos (his other two poets were Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caiero). The poem begins:

‘Ah, how refreshing it is when we fail to do our duty!
It’s like being in the countryside!
Unreliability becomes a refuge!
I breathe more easily now that I’ve missed all my appointments.’

And it ends with

‘ I can’t even manage to light my next cigarette…That would be a gesture,
And it can stay there with the others that await me in the missed meeting that is life.’

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There’s a missed book, to my mind, or one that’s due from Frances Leviston. I’ve been re-reading her 2015 book ‘Disinformation’ and realising I miss her cool, lucid intelligence. Look at the way she controls big contrasts in perspective and size in ‘Hill Top Fort’ – she’s writing about cloud shadows:

‘Their long shadows
outrace us underfoot like thoughts, sea-salt
castigates the wind and whitens the vertical
acre of scrub down to the shore,
or sharpens up the

disembodied cries
of cold birds. Almost unnoticed,
all around, the carnelian ants work, ‘

And how about this for the ending of a poem – ‘Bishop in Louisiana’

‘Try to imagine what a hundred million litres means.
You can’t. At night, before bed, in the surprisingly deep bath,
I push my big toe into the streaming faucet
and feel its pressure turn to a hot, relentless gush,
nightmarishly pleasurable, like pissing myself in my sleep.’

Lewiston has been publishing at a Larkin-like pace so far, one volume a decade (her first, Public Dream, was in 2007). I hope there’s more coming in the 2020’s.

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I don’t like all of Virga (2022) by Zimbabwean poet Togara Muzanenhamo, but there are certain poems that really impress me, enough to keep me watching out for other volumes. ‘Swakopmund’ is a six page poem of sustained, long-lined grittiness, like reading a new take on Conrad, heavily aware of dirty imperialism and full of a sense of sea-travel:

Eight shackled men. Two armed Schutztruppe at the rear.
The stink of iron on wounds green with the ache of salt.
The last of the men – a shackled ghost.
Eyes burning red with revolt.

For hours he watches the lighthouse dealing out over the harbour-
the beacon’s radial arm reaching deep into co-ordinates
lost somewhere where the wind’s conversation
begins and ends with the sea.

There are also several short poems of concentrated lyricism, into which Muzanenhamo places individual lines, untranslated, in various languages; Spanish, French, German, etc. The result could be simply baffling (depending on your knowledge of the languages used – mine isn’t great) but I enjoy that moment of estrangement or disorientation embedded in the text. Here’s how Spanish lines thread through part of ‘In the distance’.

There were never reasons to make this memory.
The moon slipping quietly behind clouds.
All sense of land gone.
E nos poderiamos ser assin para sempre…….
Ocean salt. Wooden oars pulling back.
Each stroke stirring something of the journey.
E nos deviants ter este lunar na mente….
A sense of rain builds in the distance.’

I don’t get it all. I could Google it, but I won’t, not for a while. I like to be kept curious.

‘When we read poems, or when I read poems, I often miss something, which is why we read poems again, why they don’t disclose all their meanings, all their resonances, all their sonic resources, to us at once.’
Philip Terry. ‘What is Poetry’ (excerpt from PNR)

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An endnote from the endnote of ‘’The Sounds of Poetry’ by Robert Pinsky, which I’ve just started reading. In his ‘Recommendations for Further Study’ he writes:

‘My advice for further study is to identify a poem one loves, to read it aloud, perhaps to write it longhand or type it out, and to get at least some of it by heart. Having done that, do the same with another poem, and with many more. I offer this advice not as a sentimental parting salute but as a stringent invitation to study.’