Jeffrey Turner - A House Called Paradise

 Jeffrey Turner, A House Called Paradise (Chestnut Press)

I am the privileged and grateful recipient of a copy of this limited edition produced 'for private distribution'. If it hadn't dawned on me years ago, when it should have, I'm beginning to grasp now that in the poetry world much depends on who you know. Now that I'm glad to benefit from sometimes knowing such people.

The Chestnut Press take special pleasure in producing these editions on fine paper, elegantly typeset and Jeff Turner is a poet they rightly regard as one whose poems are worthy of such presentation.

Flumen est Arar, Julius Caesar begins a passage in De Bello Gallico, before going on to explain that there is a river Arar that flows so incredibly slowly that it is impossible to tell with the naked eye in which direction it is flowing. Not all of that rote learning done to achieve 'O' level Latin fifty years ago was wasted. That line comes to mind now as almost appropriate to how Jeff's poetry works. It is luxuriantly slow-moving. It doesn't demand anything beyond patience but it certainly rewards close reading. It can't possibly have been poured out in a rush of inspiration. It must have been thought over, finessed and allowed to mature in a way that I'm sure those who enjoy fine wines or whisky would understand.

It is contingent, feeling as if it might be somehow formal or metrical but not being, exploring what might be only to find that the exploration was all there was, like,

                a track that stumbles on, uncertain

whether to find or lose itself. 

That is both a theme and the way the theme is expressed and, as such, a paragon example of how poetry at its best can extend beyond the shackles of the language it needs to escape from. Before too long, this pathway and the house called Paradise that it leads to are both the poem and an extended metaphor for life itself and,

We must take them at their word

And take our chance that this is paradise:

 

One is even impressed with four judicious semi-colons in a 45-line poem. A couple more might have made Jeff look like a campaigner for the preservation of a threatened species of punctuation but they become necessary, if not quietly radiant, in such considered writing.

But, reading as closely as I have, I've gone back several times to find how the mice evoked in the final stanza can be called 'they' when such a pronoun must surely refer to some entity previously mentioned. I go back to those that 'we take at their word', who before that 'meant to stay' and before that were 'whoever built it' and either Jeff has performed some syntactical legerdemain, it's poetry taking a bit of a chance or the poem has been loosed from its moorings. But,

There is no more, they are saying.

No further on to find

Beyond the memory of what never was.

 

Which leaves us none the wiser, then, but with some sense of having been somewhere and seen something. I told you it was about 'life'.