Barry MacSweeney : 21 / Sonnet written on February 8 1915
(Horses in Boiling Blood, pub. Equipage)
Monday Feb 8 my petlamb
My dollbird's gone
Troubled heart scrammed
Calvados for everyone
Truly we are servants of Austria
(spuds in pigfat)
Army suffering cash gonorrhoea
I am in the madness van
Hope lives like man and wife with fear
Death too like that
I salute France sweet service my dear
Poet gunner
My soul bounds to your ordered bedroom
So long stunner
(March 18, 1998 / After Apollinaire's XXI Poèmes à Lou / [Shadow Love])
@
MacSweeney is one of only two now-dead authors I've reviewed on rhubarb (the other being Pope John Paul). This poem comes from a collection that Rod Mengham has put together at Equipage (a press that I've reviewed material from before -- see the Prynne review below.)
The book here has many of MacSweeney's reactions to Apollinaire's work, although the connections can sometimes be tenuous. Equipage deserves great praise for running with MacSweeney's wild typography in other poems, and also for giving the text space to breathe -- this is a large, A4-sized volume. It's really fantastic, I mean, get this book.
MacSweeney's overt rhetorical device here is the yoke, the way in which he turns words together, either on the face (joining them petlamb) or in the paratactic rhythms (madness van) that string things together. And this kind of joining gives the poem a deeply erotic air -- it feels almost as if MacSweeney is calling us petnames, or, better, turning vast chunks of language towards that goal.
It's a stunning performance, and the way in which MacSweeney can turn, in the final lines, the language of war towards a kind of language of caring, of sexual engagement ("So long stunner") in such a weird, unassuming fashion is one of the great pleasures you can draw from this.
Monday Feb 8 my petlamb
My dollbird's gone
Troubled heart scrammed
Calvados for everyone
Truly we are servants of Austria
(spuds in pigfat)
Army suffering cash gonorrhoea
I am in the madness van
Hope lives like man and wife with fear
Death too like that
I salute France sweet service my dear
Poet gunner
My soul bounds to your ordered bedroom
So long stunner
(March 18, 1998 / After Apollinaire's XXI Poèmes à Lou / [Shadow Love])
@
MacSweeney is one of only two now-dead authors I've reviewed on rhubarb (the other being Pope John Paul). This poem comes from a collection that Rod Mengham has put together at Equipage (a press that I've reviewed material from before -- see the Prynne review below.)
The book here has many of MacSweeney's reactions to Apollinaire's work, although the connections can sometimes be tenuous. Equipage deserves great praise for running with MacSweeney's wild typography in other poems, and also for giving the text space to breathe -- this is a large, A4-sized volume. It's really fantastic, I mean, get this book.
MacSweeney's overt rhetorical device here is the yoke, the way in which he turns words together, either on the face (joining them petlamb) or in the paratactic rhythms (madness van) that string things together. And this kind of joining gives the poem a deeply erotic air -- it feels almost as if MacSweeney is calling us petnames, or, better, turning vast chunks of language towards that goal.
It's a stunning performance, and the way in which MacSweeney can turn, in the final lines, the language of war towards a kind of language of caring, of sexual engagement ("So long stunner") in such a weird, unassuming fashion is one of the great pleasures you can draw from this.
produced by Simon | 12:47 PM
1 Comments:
Douglas Oliver, and other London Poets associate with Novelist Ian Sinclair (who I consider to be a booklength poet), were promoters of Barry McSweeney a few years ago. Hellbound Memo's was the book I belive. The Anthology being Conductors of Chaos. http://www.spikemagazine.com/0696chao.php
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