First published in The Warwick Review Vol.4 No.2 June 2010
By Will Stone
‘No one gets by with his speech. The body breathes thanks to the lung of the unpronounceable.’ Francois Jacqmin
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François Jacqmin – The Book of Snow
Translated by Philip Mosley, Introduction by Clive Scott
Arc Visible Poets 28 / Isbn: 978-906570026
Anise Koltz – At the Edge of Night
Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, Introduced by Caroline Price
Arc Visible Poets 24 / Isbn: 978-1-906570030
Maurice Carême – Defying Fate
Translated by Christopher Pilling, Introduced by Martin Sorrell
Arc Visible Poets 25 / Isbn: 978-904614975
François Jacqmin, The Book of the Snow
Existential anxiety is one might say, the blood that transfuses these three highly significant collections from the ever enterprising Arc Publications and their ambitious Visible Poets series. This series aims to bring those poets whose names have too long foundered before English shores finally onto dry land. These particular poets are native to Belgium or in one case Luxemburg. They all write in French and are European in their outlook, that is to say their work is still infected by the irrationally destructive modern history of their continent and the existential questions this gives rise to, both in terms of the eventual absurdity of organised religious belief, the authenticity of language and the implausible authority of the very poem itself. Philosophically poetic, yet avoiding leading their readers into thickets of unhinged philosophical sprouting, all three of these poets are more or less grounded in what English poetry serves as its unchanging ‘menu du jour’, that is the domestic, the ‘everyday’, meaning their personal journey and how the traumas seeded by their unique familial circumstances impinge on their psyche. But unlike much of the published English poetry of the everyday, which after a session with the self-appointed creative writing workshop surgeons, complacently sports acceptable levels of irony and seriousness, these Europeans manage something genuinely profound and truly excoriating downwind of all they have observed and what they privately endured. These poets are all transfixed by the void of the blank page, the nauseating underbelly displayed when language fails, when the beast rolls over. Even in the case of Maurice Carême, who appears to be at first glance a light playful poet, a stalwart with the nation’s children, there is a darkening undercurrent, a nervous scratching at the insubstantiality of belief systems as the imminent prospect of death alerts the mind to hammer out a final tolerable resolution.
However let us begin with François Jacqmin, whom the respected Belgian writer and critic Marc Quaghebeur says achieves in his writing ‘a classical limpidity capable of opening up the faults of everyday life and of attaining a fragile tenderness.’ His able translator Philip Mosley and Professor Clive Scott echo these remarks in their illuminating introductions to this book and go further, alerting us to a visible poet who labours hard to become invisible, a poet whose one hundred and twelve meditations collected here in the unusual classical form of the French ten line poem or ‘dizain’, constitute a planned withdrawal from overt expression, the creation of a space through the neutrality of the snow field, to enable transcendental truth to flower.
‘Beautiful
without the disgrace of precaution, the snow
dazzled
with all its fragile experience.’
‘No one gets by with his speech. The body breathes thanks
to the lung of the unpronounceable.’
Mosley says of Jacqmin ‘As the snow falls, Jacqmin’s irony suffuses it. By evoking whitness and purity, dis-solution, dis-appearance, de-formation, he invents a Mallarméan palimpsest, a suite of poems aspiring to perfection, present yet absent in the pristine silent, snowy spaces of the page.’ Clive Scott eludes to Mallarmé too, and goes on to argue that Jacqmin’s simultaneous torture and release are fused in the dichotomy of the snow’s abstraction, where ‘language cannot penetrate the world’s opacity, it can only expect to compound that opacity through its own ambivalences and approximations.’ In Jaqmin’s work there is no end, no successful conclusion only something unfinished, like the snow itself which continues to fall adding yet another layer.
‘When the snow stopped falling, it continued
to snow,
a minute powder
added
a border posthumous to the work of whiteness.’
During the war Jacqmin’s family fled to England to escape the German occupation and there he learned English, writing his first poems in that language and immersing himself in its literature. When he returned as an adult to Belgium he inherited his original language and never felt truly at home with it. His poetry seems adrift with contradictions, the weariness of a consciousness that has been unable to anchor comfortably ‘We feel as perfectly coherent as nothingness’ states Jacqmin in one poem and this would seem to sum up his strangely settled yet unsettling vision, to be dispossessed of the extraneous, where language the ‘intruder’ achieves its own obliteration by making its announcement on the page and in doing so leaves room for a more meaningful prescient silence.
Anise Koltz At the Edge of Night
Anita Koltz lives has lived in Luxemburg since 1928 and is the nation’s most prolific woman poet. In her seventh decade she continues to write poems that sear the reader with their in exhaustive honesty and willingness to confront the barbarism of existence. To read Koltz is to stand rooted before the oncoming blades of a combine. There is no tinsel, no indulgent peripheral detail or clever lead ins. she begins as she means to go on, with an unequalled icy precision, each poem a minor operation carried out before the patient is even aware of what is happening. Her knife is sharp and its position perfectly judged. Over the four more recent collections contained in this volume translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, we have a powerful slug of Koltz’s vision. Straight away she leaves us in no doubt as to the nature of her poetry.
prologue
Life is no long quiet river
but a bloodbath
yet you ask me for
poetry decorated with flowers
with little birds
I’m sorry Ladies and Gentlemen
each of my poems
buries your dead.
Like Jacqmin, Koltz is wary of language. She too is in an anxious dialogue with a the blank page. Interestingly she began to write in German, but following the war and her husbands treatment at the hands of the Nazis, she abandoned her mother tongue following his death in 1971 and took up French, so again like Jacqmin, she suffered a linguistic rupture which both instills a peculiar originality to her writing process, but also dogs it with self doubt.
All my life
I have sat
in front of the blank page
lacking the courage
to turn it.
then again later
‘I entice the page
so that it may lie
beneath my writing.’
The pared down nature of Koltz’s poetry gives it an aphoristic feel, the subject matter ranges from a loathing for her mother ‘she throws herself on me and sucks out my marrow.’ A despair at God’s silence. ‘There is no ark. I smother God with my hair’ ‘On the seventh day, God dozed off. The earth is still shaken by his snoring.’ And unsurprisingly the fear of death falls like a fine rain over her work. ‘We are immortal, as long as we live.’
Ever present too is the sense of a distrust of words and yet at the same time that they alone are the only plausible anchor in a world turned irrevocably insane.
‘My words are grown used to war
to atom bomb attacks
to concentration camps
my malnourished anaemic
words
have terror filled eyes.’
But there is an inherent visionary greatness to Koltz’s work which raises her to the level of the leading European women poets. Like Jacqmin or any other poet for that matter, she is most powerful when she measures the explicit, when she allows the gift of her visionary element to dominate and squeeze out the sometimes overbalancing spitting rage.
‘the sun sets a trap
for the birds
and devours them in the evening
spitting out their shadows.’
Will Stone, June 2010
