Let there be light. Clarissa Aykroyd's debut pamphlet of poems provides it.Having noticed 'light' in the first few poems, I checked ahead and found only a few that make no mention of it so I decided it must be thematic.
It isn't wise to interpret good poems too thoroughly because they will always be more than the interpretation and they can be worn away to less than they are by exegesis. There would be no point in them being poems if they could be so summarily explained away. But 'light' for Clarissa is, very roughly, 'peace, love and understanding' and suchlike and the shadow and darkness it emerges from are trauma, difficulty and all things grim. These poems are often alive with the struggle between the two.
As a translator as much as a poet in English, Clarissa is internationalist in outlook. The world doesn't end at the border of a country and poetry doesn't stop at the borders of language. Several of these poems are from places she has obviously travelled to.
In post-wall Berlin the emergence into light is as yet partial, and haunted, in which 'flags and guards breathe out the West' but 'the dead and lost...are still among us' and,
The silver eyes of the dead will not let us forget.
Lisbon, with more of a sense of freedom, is,
Chessboard city. Beyond the rivermouth
explorers were colliding with the currents.
One could spend a lot of time and energy trying to find all the things suggested by lines like those and never know if you'd done enough. That's why it's poetry and best left as it is to be appreciated in all its potential.
Mise en scène is latently sinister with its 'tedious' dead body extending the slightly New Age feel of some of the poems into laudable irony. If there is sometimes a tendency towards spiritual optimism, and a suspicion that the ideas are a higher priority than the music of the language, which might be something a translator is prone to do, Clarissa is plenty capable enough of delivering the ominous underside, too. It isn't optimism for its own sake, it needs to be gained and the nightmares are always with us.
Machado and Celan are two poets in translation honoured in poems of her own. Opening the collection with 'As though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul' sets the tone with its great first line,
He had to fly into the storm because there was nothing but storm.
It's always a good idea to begin with one of your best poems and this involves translation, light, love, loss and a sort of redemption in words. The book represents 25 years of writing and is admirably frugal in collecting so few from such a long time. It is far better to publish only those pieces that still seem worthwhile rather than, as others might, rush into print at the earliest, and every, opportunity and regret it later. I wouldn't ever accuse such a thoughtful slim volume of being a 'sequence' but, having begun with the storm, it ends with clarity and understanding in Wicklow Mountains after Rain,
by then I will have come to know all
that can be painted in brushstrokes of gold
on the world's vault and the sky of hills.
That is the point.
Broken Sleep Books are a publisher I'd not encountered before. This is a neat book with a tasteful, understated cover. If the rest of their catalogue is as worthwhile as this impressive little book they are doing very commendable work indeed.
