Jeffrey Side has had poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg Review, and on poetry web sites such as Underground Window, A Little Poetry, Poethia, nthposition, eratio, Ancient Heart, Blazevox, Lily, Big Bridge, Jacket, Textimagepoem, Apochryphaltext, 9th St. Laboratories, P.F.S. Post, Great Works, hutt, ken*again, Poets' Corner, The Dande Review, Poetry Bay, Dusie and CybpherAnthology. He has reviewed poetry for New Hope International, Stride, Acumen, and Shearsman. From 1996 to 2000 he was the assistant editor of The Argotist Magazine. He now runs The Argotist Online.

 

The poems in Bariane Louise Rowlands’s collection of poetry and photographs, A Fool in the Pack, are interesting for the way in which the physical world is transformed into that of the intellectual and emotional:

And we scrutinise bark, stone
organic matters,
and get lost on stringy plains of sound.
Looking up at you, my head
still a cup in the palm-cap of your hand,
you say, “I loved you when you were born”. 

                                           (‘A Future Full of Tomorrows’)

The stanza begins with recognition of the materiality of nature (‘bark’, ‘stone’ and ‘organic matters’) but soon metamorphoses into an examination of consciousness, as the “perceivers” of this solid natural world find themselves getting ‘lost on stringy plains of sound’. In just a few lines, we have travelled from the physical to the non-physical realm of sound vibrations. The use of the word ‘stringy’ is especially appropriate, here, as it represents the indeterminacy and problematical nature of human hearing processes, where the hearer can occasionally misinterpret sounds.

The second half of the stanza is replete with imagery of renewal and rebirth. The image of the head as a cup in the palm of a hand is a striking example of the way Rowlands takes archetypal imagery and reinvigorates them with new resonances. In this instance, we see how the foetus in the womb is re-imagined as, ‘my head / still a cup in the palm-cap of your hand’: the head standing for the living organism, and the palm standing for the womb. The statement that concludes this stanza (‘I loved you when you were born’) serves to reiterate the nascency imagery.

 On the other hand, Rowlands is also capable of producing starkly lucid imagery, as in ‘Who Knows Where’ where the night becomes ‘sharp’, and the grass is depicted as ‘spiking at stars’.  However, her overall poetic tenor in this poem is such that it enables a fusion of meticulousness and generality, as can be seen in the following stanza where the human body becomes almost an admixture of the earth:

The infinity of unknown pours
endlessly into my pupils, spilling over
and out across the lawn.

Here, the physical organs of the eyes act as both vessels and refractors for the liquid-like property that ‘pours endlessly’ into, and through them, onto the earth. The use of an abstract word combination (‘infinity of unknown’) enables an allusion to an alchemical process that is able to render the abstraction of ‘infinity of unknown’ into substance that has liquidity.

In ‘Dreamcatchers’, the problematical nature of meaning in art is broached as two people, one a painter the other a writer, conclude that art that depends on language to facilitate a psychological and emotional intimacy between people is not as effective as art that doesn’t. The extent to which Rowlands as a poet, herself, believes this or not does not impinge upon the fictive element of the poem, which is made to articulate certain concerns that all artists must, at some time or another, have, if only fleetingly, considered. The poem’s speaker addresses the absent other, thus:

And yet we had struggled
with translation in word,
but in paint we meet.                                                         

In the same way that we saw how Rowlands transforms the physical world into that of the intellectual and emotional, this poem achieves something similar regarding linguistic signs and speech:

I speak not words from mouth
but images of mind:
shapes of the heart,
visions of living itself.

Here, the mouth, a physical attribute of the body, allows its semantic signallings to be changed into non-verbal and non-linguistic mental “events”. Language is transmuted into mental activity, or ‘images of mind’. It is as if the speaker has to do this in order for language to become as effective in communication as he/she believes art that is bereft of language is. 

This is a very interesting collection and at times deeply moving.